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INTERNATIONAL POLICT. 



LONDON : 

ROBSON AND SON, GEEAT NORTHEBN PRINTING WORKS, 

PANCRAS ROAD, N.W. 



^INTERNATIONAL POLICY. 



€0Siit)0 



FOBEIGN BELATI0N8 OF ENGLAND. 



" The fundamental doctrine of modern social life is the subordination 
of Politics to Morals." 

AUGUSTE COMTE. 



LONDON: 
CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193 PICCADLLLY. 

MDCCCLXVI. \j{b^ 
[ITie right of translation is reserved.] 



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PREFACE. 



A FEW words only are needed by way of preface to 
tliis book. It resembles in form several recent pub- 
lications : it is a collection of Essays by different 
writers, each of whom signs his name. It differs 
from most, if not all, such recent publications in the 
definiteness of its object and in its immediately poli- 
tical and practical character. 

Certain principles are adopted equally by all the 
contributors, and they are adopted from the political 
and social system known as Positiyism. But beyond 
the adoption of these principles, to be shortly stated, 
no one of the writers is to be considered as com- 
mitted to that system, unless he himself in his 
Essay adyances farther. 

There are three positions on which the writers 
are agreed. 

First. That the international relations of mankind 
are a fit subject for a systematic policy. 

Secondly. That such systematic policy is to be 



Yl PEEPACE. 



based on the acceptance of duties, not on the assertion 
of rights ; that it ought to haye a moral, not a poli- 
tical or purely national foundation. All questions, 
therefore, concerning the interest, power, or prestige 
of any particular nation are secondary and subordi- 
nate. All appeals to motives drawn from such con- 
siderations are consistently discarded; all arguments 
which ultimately inyolye the doctrine of the rights 
of such nation are put aside as irrelevant and futile. 

Thirdly. The arguments advanced are in all cases 
drawn from considerations of a purely human cha- 
racter, as alone susceptible of legitimate and profitable 
discussion. 

Within the limit of these three propositions all 
the writers equally, I repeat, accept a connection with 
the doctrines of M. Comte ; but not beyond this limit. 
It is important to observe that their responsibility as 
joint contributors is confijied to this degree of accept- 
ance. Cooperation for a common object ought to be 
possible, without impairing in other respects the free 
action of those who cooperate ; and may be possible, 
if due care be taken by them on their side, and their 
efforts be met with fair candour on the part of the 
reader. On minor points there will probably be a 
certain amount of disagreement. The highly complex 
nature of the problems to be solved, when we pass 



PEEFACE. YU 

from the abstract to the concrete, from the theoretical 
to the practical handling of international affairs, ren- 
ders this almost ineyitable. Yet, on the whole, it is 
hoped that a large amonnt of agreement will equally 
be traceable — a sufficiently large amonnt to be an 
evidence of the yalne of the system which makes it 
attainable. The field of subjects treated is wide and 
varied ; it embraces a number of complicated human 
relations. It will be much if, writing independently 
of each other, we arrive in the main at convergent 
conclusions, and differ only when the difference in- 
volves nothing but the value of such and such means. 
Public opinion on matters of international policy is 
in a state of chaos. If we attain fundamental agree- 
ment on these matters, such a result should draw 
attention to the method by the aid of which it is 
attained, no less than to the conclusions which it is 
our primary object to advocate, and that apart from 
any consideration of the method. 

May 1st, 1866. 



Note. — With a European war imininent, it may be added that 
the first three Essays, which treat of Continental affairs, were 
completed in the course of 1864 and 1865. It seemed needless, 
in a Yolume dealing with general principles, to introduce any re- 
ference to more recent events which affect the forms of expression 
used rather than the policy or opinions maintained. 



CONTENTS. 



ESSAY PAGE 

I. THE WEST. By Richard Congreve, M.A., late FeUow 

and Tutor of Wadham College, Oxford .... 1 

II. EXGTLAND AND FRANCE. By Frederic Harrison, 
M.A., Fellow and late Tutor of Wadham College, 
Oxford 51 

III. ENGLAND AND THE SEA. By E. S. Beesly, M.A., 
of Wadham College, Oxford, Professor of History at 
University College, London 153 

lY. ENGLAND AND INDIA. By E. H. Pember, M.A., late 

Student of Christ Church, Oxford 223 

Y. ENGLAND AND CHINA. By J. H. Bridges, M.B., 

late Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford . . . .327 

YI. ENGLAND AND JAPAN. By Charles A. Cookson, 

B.A., of Oriel CoUege, Oxford . . . . .449 

YII. ENGLANT) AND THE UNCIYILISED COMMUNI- 
TIES. By Henry Dix Hutton, of Lincoln's Inn, 
Barrister-at-Law 515 



No. I. 



THE WEST, 



BY 



EICHAED CONGREVE. 



THE WEST. 



The decline of the power of Catholicism, and the 
consequent disunion of medieval Europe, were first 
evidenced by disorder in the international relations 
of its several constituent states. It is in the same 
international relations that the restoration of order 
must begin, as the first step to the reorganisation of 
modern Europe on a sound basis; to the reconsti- 
tution of a new union analogous to, not identical 
mth, that ofiered by Catholicism. This is shortly 
the ground on which the present work rests for its 
justification in dealing with the largest questions of 
human policy. The right settlement of these ques- 
tions is the indispensable condition of all the more 
special ones which press for solution. 

The instinctive sense that this condition is indis- 
pensable is nowhere seen more clearly than in the 
language of those who would wholly renounce any 
attempt at its fulfilment. It is loudly urged by the 
partisans of the doctrine of non-intervention, at pre- 
sent in the ascendant, that we should, in our own 
interest, abstain from any handling of such matters, 

B 



2 THE WEST. 

We should thus be free to turn our attention to what 
more immediately concerns ourselves. This is a set- 
tlement of its kind — unsound in principle and not 
possible in practice; still a settlement, and betraying 
the consciousness that the internal order which its 
advocates aim at depends primarily on the order 
without. Kejecting their conclusion, we may accept 
as valuable their agreement. 

We are told that we are incompetent ; that human 
intelligence must abandon as hopelessly beyond its 
capacity the direction of the affairs of the world. In 
the conviction that such a view is at once erroneous 
and noxious — erroneous in its estimate of man's ca- 
pacity; noxious in that it discourages his legitimate 
exertion of his intellect, and sanctions indirectly all 
his anarchical tendencies — the present work is under- 
taken. The whole history of man is one continuous 
argument against the error which underlies this theory 
of renunciation. It deserves mention only so far as, 
by contrast, it helps to give greater prominence to 
the opposite view, that the direction and government 
of the world are emphatically man's business — a busi- 
ness for which he has been progressively becoming 
more and more qualified. He may not take refuge 
in any vicarious system, in the substitution for his 
own careful and intelligent action of some other 
guidance, be it some external power, or, as is more 
common, his own selfish instincts. 

The difiiculty of the task which thus falls on man; 
the inadequacy of his faculties in their primitive 
weakness; the necessity of a long training to raise 
them to the desired level — all this is allowed. But 
however difiicult the task, however inadequate the 
faculties, it has been attempted, and they have been 



THE WEST. 3 

found in a degree sufficient during the preliminary 
period of man's education. They have been exercised 
on their proper work, and formed by such exercise 
for its more and more perfect performance. The 
hio'hest inheritance of the human race is this accu- 
mulated power, to which successive generations add 
their quota, and which each in its turn uses with 
greater skill. It were treason to the past to halt in 
this course, to renounce this inheritance. 

Nothing is more obvious on the face of History 
than the gradual growth of its scale; the gradual 
enlargement of the mutual action and reaction of the 
different di^dsions of the human race. In the earliest 
periods to which we can carry our retrospect, prior 
to the opening of the historical era, we find several 
civilisations coexistent, but " isolated. We may trace 
the order and continuance of the Egyptian theocracy 
through many centuries, before it had any consecu- 
tive connection with surrounding nations. The same 
may be said of the Indian theocracy and of the 
Chinese empire. In Western Asia — and it is with 
Western Asia that we enter on the connected series 
of historical events — one monarchy succeeded another 
during a long period, without involving in its rise or 
fall any extra - Asiatic population. The traders of 
Phoenicia were the sole link between otherwise wholly 
unconnected nations. 

With the close of this period of isolation. History 
in its narrower, more technical sense opens. It is 
concentrated at first within narrow limits, on the 
shores of the -^gean, and on the mutual relations of 
Greece and Western Asia. It rapidly widens, and 
embraces the whole basin of the Mediterranean. To- 
wards this common centre was drawn for many cen- 



4 THE WEST. 

turies all the activity of the race. The circumference 
from which it was drawn was constantly enlarging ; 
the bounds of the habitable world were constantly 
receding. The process was completed when the al- 
most simultaneous discovery of America and the 
sea-passage to India threw open the Atlantic, the 
Southern, and Indian Oceans, followed shortly by the 
crossing of the Pacific and the verification of the 
bounds of man's world. 

This simple, outward, geographical expression 
may suffice to indicate the increase of contact be- 
tween the several parts of the earth and the nations 
which inhabit them. This increase has been natu- 
rally followed by a growing sense of their mutual 
interdependence. "Widely various as have been found 
to be their manners and customs, their civil polities 
and religious creeds, still, in one relation or another, 
they have been felt to be united by some common 
bond, traversing all outward differences. The exist- 
ence of a common interest, and the cooperation of all 
in the furtherance of that interest, is an idea which, 
long tacitly assumed, has been drawn out into greater 
consciousness. The necessary consequence of the de- 
velopment of such an idea is the conception of the 
I unity of the race. No theory as to its origin, no 
* different estimate of the capabilities of its different 
parts, need or can disturb this practical relative con- 
ception. Under whatever divisions man exists, races, 
national aggregates, tribes, empires, states, families, 
all are but integral parts, practically, of one whole; 
branches of one great family ; each with its proper 
function ; each able to minister to the welfare of the 
others and of the whole. They are organs of one 
common organism, Humanity. 



THE ^AHEST. 5 

The idea of this great organism — the idea of Hu-- 
manity as a real collective personality — has been long 
becoming more and more familiar to the thought 
and action of man. It is not to my present purpose 
to trace any further the process of its growth and 
acceptance, nor even that of its systematisation. It is 
enough that, in some degree, it is a not unfamiliar, 
not unaccepted notion. Nor again is it unfamiliar 
or unaccepted that the different coexistent portions 
of the race — the actual generation, in other words — • 
bear a certain definite relation to those which shall 
follow them ; that they work for the future, handing 
down to that future the inheritance they have re- 
ceived. This part of the conception of Humanity — 
and it is an integral part of it — is in a greater or less 
degree an object of general consciousness, however 
much at times the obligation it involves may be set 
aside at the dictate of immediate interest. The point 
in which there is the greatest deficiency is the rela- 
tion of the actual present generation to the past. 
The estimate of its obligations in this respect is low, 
and consequently the due subordination to the past 
is often wanting. But this is, no less than the two 
others, an integral part of the conception. It is even 
of the three the most essential, the most characteristic 
part. As such it never has been, never can be wholly 
ignored ; but it may, with most injurious conse- 
quences, be weakened and obscured. The sense of 
continuity in both directions is as indispensable to 
the right ordering of human affairs, as it is to our 
right intellectual grasp of the questions relating to 
man's position and destiny. 

Side by side with this conception of the Unity of 
the Eace, so developed and completed, there has at 



l/ 



b THE WEST. 

all times existed another — that of a hierarchical coor- 
dination of its several parts. Long implicitly enter- 
tained, with the growth of the race it became a part 
of its explicit belief. That some are superior, others 
inferior ; that there is a ruling part and a subject 
part ; — this doctrine is so easy of comprehension that 
it naturally preceded, by a wide interval, any direct 
traces of the former. The shape it wore originally 
was the simplest possible. Each tribe or nation in- 
terpreted it for itself, and claimed superiority over 
all others. It bears, as the other conceptions of man 
bear, the stamp of selfishness. But gradually, and 
in the natural course of things, it has tended to clear 
itself of that evil, to transform itself. Originally put 
forward for the mere good of the superior, stronger, 
or ruling part, it has passed by imperceptible degrees 
into the service of the inferior, weaker, and subject. 
Neither the one character nor the other has, speaking 
generally, been exclusive. The nobler image and the 
baser have coexisted; now the one, now the other 
assuming greater distinctness and prominence. In 
the earliest history this superiority was asserted by 
war, to secure the personal services of the van- 
quished. Its next stage was a change in the ob- 
ject, when political aggrandisement and the incorpo- 
ration of the weaker nations became the aim. Such 
was the ambition of the Empires of Western Asia ; 
such the dream of Greek statesmen, modified by the 
desire to impart the products of their civilisation ; 
such was the result of the conquests of Alexander. 
The most perfect expression of the earlier theory, 
and the transition at the same time to the later, is 
to be found in the Roman Empire. It combined, 
with the ideas of incorporation and organisation of 



THE WEST. 7 

the incorporated, the higher conception of an influ- 
ence to be exercised by the more perfect organisms 
formed on those ideas on the remainder of the race, 
the portions which it felt itself unable directly to 
absorb. In this respect, as in so many others, the 
policy of Imperial was inherited and carried out to 
its fuller perfection by Papal Eome. With the 
necessary modifications, the Popes laboured at the 
incorporation in one great whole of all the nations 
of the earth. 

The form such incorporation took under Catho- 
licism was essentially different from that which it 
had taken under the older Empire. A spiritual and 
moral union was substituted for a mere political one. 
This new method was adopted exclusively within the 
limits to which the influence of Kome had extended 
directly or indirectly. Beyond such limits the supe- 
riority of Christendom has been too often asserted by 
an appeal to force. In the better days of the Chris- 
tian Church the object principally aimed at — and as 
far as possible exclusively aimed at — was the ame- 
lioration of the inferior. It was the conversion, 
civilisation, humanising, that was the primary end; 
all others were but accessory. It was reserved for 
the decay and degradation of the great Christian 
commonwealth, taken as a whole, — for its period of 
conscious disruption and disorganisation, — to look 
on the more backward portion of our race as in 
theory the mere instruments of the power and wealth 
of the more advanced. It is from that period that 
dates the conception of a whole race doomed to per- 
petual inferiority, destined to be the property of an- 
other race. It was reserved for this period to undo, 
so far as it could, the work in which the medieval 



8 THE WEST. 

Chiirch had shared, the constitution of the freedom 
of the industrial classes ; to treat labour, which that 
Church had shown its respect for without the power 
of organising it, as a degradation ; and to organise, 
in the mere spirit of commercial cupidity, a trade in 
the African race. The idea of raising and civilising 
became wholly secondary, or rather was set aside ; 
and the sole object really set before men was the 
ease, dignity, and wealth of the stronger. 

These last remarks are enough to show that, 
taken alone, the more complete connection and inter- 
dependence of the different nations are not neces- 
sarily for the good of all, any more than is the supe- 
riority asserted by one part over the other. Both 
may ultimately have a good tendency; both may be 
necessary conditions of subsequent good ; but both, 
misdirected, or even simply undirected, may result 
for an indefinite period in the greatest evil. The 
closer the contact, the fuller may be the oppression 
of the weaker by the stronger ; a worse evil than 
their mutual ignorance of one another. In fact, it 
were not difficult to show that the increase of inter- 
course has been premature ; that it would have been 
better, for many reasons, had it been delayed. The 
collision between great but undisciplined power and 
weakness is necessarily fraught mth ill consequences. 
,, The appliances of a high material civilisation used 
J mthout any moral check, and under the stimulus of 
contempt and aversion, bring nothing but evil to 
those who enjoy them, and to those on whom they 
are used. Compare the attitude of the barbarian 
invaders of the Roman Empire, in the fifth, sixth, 
and seventh centuries, with that assumed by the 
civilised conquerors of Mexico or Peru, or by the 



THE WEST. y 

more highly- developed nations which are now in con- 
tact with the great powers of the extreme East. 

Yet of the two great facts with which I have been 
deahng, — the spread of contact and the supremacy of 
some one portion of the whole — thus expressed in their 
utmost generality, — the second, if left to its natural 
course, is the least liable to injurious consequences. 
For the more it is carried out, the more nearly its 
realisation is attained, the more do those conse- 
quences diminish. The violence and injustice which 
accompany the process of its establishment tend to 
cease when it is established. The great power gained 
becomes, by a natural reaction, moral and beneficial 
in its use. Ex hypothesis it excludes competitors, and 
so guarantees peace ; and the peaceful society of man, 
if secure from disturbance, would advance by its own 
laws. In the actual succession of history the supre- 
macy thus supposed has never been attained. Each 
of the powers which in turn has aspired to it has 
failed ; yet the failure does not invahdate the lesson 
taught by the unbroken series of attempts. That 
series indicates that the problem is a real practical 
one ; the failure only shows that the methods of 
solving it hitherto employed have been faulty in 
principle or inadequate in their means of execu- 
tion. 

It is, I conceive, demonstrable that the idea in- 
volved in all the attempts at union of the race, by 
conquest or otherwise, which the history of the past 
enumerates, is a true one, has a reality, and is 
realisable. There are two essential requisites for its 
beneficial realisation. The first is, that the power 
which attempts it should be duly subordinated to 
the larger whole of which, by its very nature, it is 



10 THE WEST. 

a part ; that it should acknowledge its dependence 
upon, and feel that it is but a representative of, that 
larger whole. The second requisite is, that it should 
be in its constitution a power analogous to the larger 
body on which it is to act. That body is complex, 
formed of many parts, and of parts differing greatly 
from one another. The agent must also be com- 
plex : constituted, that is, by more than one nation ; 
constituted, in fact, by several nations differing also 
from one another. In this way no merely national 
interest could get the complete supremacy. In this 
way there would be ample provision for a larger 
range of sympathies with those outside, and a just 
mutual control with reference to those within. 

In the simple series of social existences with which 
we are ultimately brought into contact, — ^the family, 
the country, humanity, — we need for practical pur- 
poses the intercalation of a new term, a collective 
existence wider than the country or state, less ex- 
tensive than humanity. The largest organism, hu- 
manity, is unselfish, but powerless immediately. It 
is the end, not the means. The smaller one, that of 
the state, has power to work out its purposes, but is 
too isolated and selfish. We want, then, an inter- 
mediate organism free from the state's peculiar evil, 
free also from the necessary impuissance of human- 
ity. We need an organism which can be invested 
with a leadership — the hegemony of the race — not for 
its o^vn service and advancement, but for the service 
and advancement of the race. This is no new idea, 
as is evident from what has been above said. It has 
been repeatedly tried with varyiug success. The pro- 
visional creations of the past have in their failure 
left us the indications of success, the materials for 



THE WEST. 11 

the definitive construction of a power competent to 
this high function. 

An attentive study of all the previous eiForts of 
man in this direction will be the safest guide in our 
constructive effort. Enough has been already said 
on this point to justify the conclusion that the leader- 
ship of the human race is vested in the West. What 
is the precise value or form to be given to such 
leadership is another question; but in some form or 
other the conclusion is generally accepted. All not 
only within the pale of Western civilisation, but those 
without — not only, that is, those who participate in 
the function, but those on whom and for whom it is 
instituted and to be exercised, — all equally recognise 
its existence. 

The African races assert no initiative. They wait 
for,, and are not averse to accept, a wise guidance. 
Egypt was their one great and inestimable contribu- 
tion to the progress of man. With the disappearance 
of the Egyptian theocracy, . any active influence on 
their part has ceased. The vast Polytheistic Empires 
of the East, in their strong organisation, strong under 
any delusive appearances of weakness, have also re- 
nounced, if they ever put forward, any claim to the 
direction of others. They seek but to avoid undue 
interference, a hasty and rude disturbance of their 
existing order. Their attitude is passive and recep- 
tive — an attitude of expectation, if necessarily and 
justifiably of distrustful expectation. The same may 
be said of the aggregate of the Mohammedan powers. 
Since the tide of Arab mvasion was turned at Tours, 
and the fear of Turkish conquest was removed by 
Lepanto, the Mussulman has gradually settled into 
his present position, that of a tacif acknowledgment 



12 THE WEST. 

of the practical supremacy of the West, with the 
further step, in the case of Turkey, of a large adop- 
tion of its ideas. By the common consent, whether 
willing or reluctant, the leadership has devolved 
on Europe. It is accepted as a fact throughout the 
world, wherever there is any consciousness of the 
human movement, that from the activity of the West, 
disturbing and irritating as it is, can alone come any 
such modifications in the general management of hu- 
man affairs as are to be wished or expected; that it 
is to the same source that the various nations must 
look for such modifications of their modes of thought, 
and consequently of their institutions, as can be re- 
ceived from without, and independently of their own 
national development. 

By the method of elimination, then, we have 
reached this point, that the guidance of the des- 
tinies of man, of the whole human race, is vested in 
Europe. The actual consciousness of the world ac- 
cepts this term Europe as a whole. We shall shortly 
see that it needs still further clearing and definition. 
This will follow if we attempt to get a clear concep- 
tion of what the term the West means, how far it is 
synonymous with, how far different from, Europe. 
In other words, let us seek an adequate answer to 
the question — What constitutes the West ? 

The actual, the ofiicial state-system of Europe is a 
heterogeneous aggregate. For any purposes of com- 
mon action it consists of ^yq great Powers. Since 
the peace of Vienna, France, England, Austria, Prus- 
sia, and Russia have virtually constituted Europe ; 
and still substantially the system remains the same. 
The diplomatic world essentially recognises these fi\e^ 
and these only, though its view is rapidly under- 



THE WEST. 13 

going a modification in consequence of tlie recent 
events in Italy. The minor powers have their own 
position in the European system, but the system is 
in the greater. There is the real power. It is 
foreign to my present object to enter on any detailed 
examination of this system, to point out its discord- 
ances, its weaknesses, its tendencies to decay, its im- 
minent dissolution. I imagine that all feel that a 
large modification of it, if not its disruption, is at 
hand ; that most thinking politicians would hail the 
largest possible modification consistent with the ob- 
jects so provisional an institution has more or less 
secured, European peace and order. 

I would rather dwell on the different conception 
of the European order which should be substituted 
for it. The first step in this process is, however, still 
negative. The elimination of Russia from the system 
is the first great rectification. She is an Eastern, not 
a Western power, or more Eastern than Western. 
This naturally suggests the question, wherein lies the 
difference, what grounds are there in reason or his- 
tory for asserting such a distinction? It is an im- 
j)ortant question, and must be answered. 

It has been assumed, and up to a certain point 
all would grant the assumption, that there are solid 
distinctions between the various branches of the hu- 
man race. It is assumed further, that, for the guid- 
ance of the whole, we need to construct some arti- 
ficial and lesser unity, one which shall admit some 
branches whilst it does not admit others. These two 
assumptions made, the ground on which, in one case, 
the claim to form a part of such lesser unity is allowed, 
in another disallowed, is the participation directly or 
indirectly, completely or incompletely, in the progres- 



14 THE WEST. 

sive civilisation which, since the repulse of the theo- 
cracy of Western Asia by Greece, has characterised 
Europe. That progressive civilisation includes three 
essential movements — the intellectual cultivation of 
Greece, the social incorporation of Western Europe 
by Kome, and the Catholic-Feudal organisation of 
mediaeval Europe. The three have formed one con- 
tinuous progress. They have been followed by a 
fourth of a different character, which has however 
been confined, equally with the other three, to the 
same populations. For the sake of clearness I enu- 
merate the portions of the race which the establish- 
ment of such a ground of union excludes. Oceania 
and Africa, of course, are excluded. So, too, are the 
Polytheistic civilisations of Eastern Asia. Inheritors 
to a degree of the intellect of Greece, and at one 
time depositories of its science, and almost its sole 
cultivators, the Mohammedan nations have still been 
totally alien to the other movements, and must stand 
apart from the directing body. 

So far would be practically allowed by all. It 
is, however, a more legitimate inference from the 
same grounds that Eussia cannot be admitted. True, 
her court and government are in a sense western. 
True, her religion is in the main doctrinally the same 
as that of the West ; still she is even less than the 
leading Mussulman populations qualified for partici- 
pation. Her religion has had no value socially, her go- 
vernment cannot supply the deficiencies of the nation 
it in a high degree wisely directs. Eussia has not, as 
a nation, shared in Greco-Eoman culture. She was 
never incorporated by Eome. She was not brought 
within the discipline of Catholicism, nor organised by 
Feudalism. She has been as a nation alien to the 



THE west: 15 

movement of later European thought. Evidently she 
stands at a distinct point from all those nations which 
have undergone these profound changes. She is on a 
lower level of training and tradition than they are. 
She should follow, adopt, assimilate, not attempt to 
lead or control. If admitted, she is a heterogeneous 
element, vitiating the whole unity and lowering its 
pohcy ; she is a source of retrogradation, not a means 
of progress. Indeed, a sufficient justification for the 
exclusion of Kussia is found in a right estimate of 
the social change which has lately attracted the atten- 
tion, and, in a considerable measure, the admiration 
of Western Europe. It has been a vast and difficult 
transition through which Eussia has passed success- 
fully. But, in itself, it marks how backward she was. 
It is many centuries since Western Europe passed 
through the same stage — the transformation of the 
serf into the free man. Nothing could make it rea- 
sonable that a nation hardly yet clear of serfage 
should direct those which have long been free. 

With reference to the general direction of Euro- 
pean policy the exclusion of Eussia is a cardinal 
point ; and Eussia herself has greatly facilitated its 
acceptance and practical adoption, were the statesmen 
of the West alive to the opportunity she has given 
them, and sufficiently above their internal dissensions 
to seize it. The result of the Crimean war should 
have been to exclude her. Political exigencies gave 
her an opening for reentering the councils of Europe, 
of which she availed herself with great skill. A se- 
cond occasion was offered, and is still available, in 
regard to Poland. Her persistence m her policy 
against the remonstrances of Western Europe, her 
haughty defiance to the expressed opinions of the 



16 THE WEST. 

other governments and to the general public opinion 
of the West, should have been met, and might still be 
met, not by war — that were an unjustifiable folly when 
no definite end can be assigned — but by shutting her 
out from all direct participation in Western affairs. 
Such a remedy involves no hostility to Eussia within 
her own proper sphere. It is indicated, I venture 
to think, by the whole previous course of European 
history and policy. It is imperatively demanded 
not as a punishment for Eussia, but as the effica- 
cious guarantee of the right subsequent conduct of 
Europe. 

Let me put an hypothesis which may make my 
meaning quite clear. ISTear the close of the year 1863 
the Emperor of the French proposed to the Govern- 
ments of Europe that they should meet in congress to 
avert the dangers which threatened its public order. 
The proposal was declined; and I have no wish to 
question the judgment shown in the refusal. The 
objections to that refusal applied to its form rather 
than its substance. As proposed, it seems clear that 
the congress could lead to no useful result. Let us 
suppose the proposal renewed, as it conceivably may 
yet be ; or let us suppose a counter-proposal made ; a 
proposal, that is, for an European congress under 
different conditions — for a congress viz. of the Powers 
which, on the grounds above given, are natural con- 
stituents of a strictly European or Western assembly. 
Such an assembly would exclude Eussia, to say no- 
thing of other parts of Europe geographically so 
called. The invitations to attend it would be ad- 
dressed to the five true Western Powers whose com- 
munity of traditions and associations would enable 
them to form a relatively homogeneous body, com- 



THE WEST. 17 

petent to discuss their difficult mutual relations and 
their no less difficult joint action, and from such 
discussion might spring very salutary consequences. 
But the peaceful exclusion of Russia could form no 
legitimate subject for complaint any more than that 
of Turkey. The congress so composed would be com- 
posed on a definite principle, justified at once by the 
historical antecedents as well as by the actual poli- 
tical needs of Europe. 

I conceive that of the two Powers excluded from 
this hypothetical assembly, Turkey is the one which 
might with the greater show of reason claim admis- 
sion. In other words, Turkey is more Western than 
Russia. As the leading Mohammedan state, the in- 
heritor of the traditions of the earlier Mohammedan 
powers, the successor in its aggressive tendencies of 
the Arabian Khaleefate, Turkey is far more intimately 
bound up with the history of Europe than is Russia, 
whose admission to that history is barely a century 
old. The struggle with the Ottoman Empire colours 
deeply the history of Western Europe for the first 
three centuries of its modern period. It has largely 
modified the mutual relations of its different states. 
In that struggle the dangerous aggrandisement of the 
Austro- Spanish house — an aggrandisement which is 
the key to so long a chapter of European politics — 
finds its explanation and its justification. When, from 
the field of Pavia, Francis I. sent his ring to the 
Sultan, when Elizabeth of England invoked his aid, 
both but acted on the conviction that the Power they 
addressed was intimately connected with the general 
interests of Europe ; a conviction which has remained 
unshaken during the succeeding centuries. Such, 
in rudimentary expression, might be the historical 

c 



18 THE WEST. 

argument for acquiescence in the claims of Turkey. 
JSTor is there wanting a political counterpart, the 
strength of which lies in the very circumstance which 
will be, and has been, most vehemently urged as the 
ground for the extrusion of Turkey from the Euro- 
pean body politic. It is her religion which would 
make me wish for her admission, were it legitimate 
on other grounds. Every recognition of Turkey, down 
to the latest at the time of the Crimean war, has been 
valuable as a protest against the spirit of religious 
exclusiveness, as an acknowledgment that there may 
be common human and political action in spite of 
the barriers raised by a difference of faith. Every 
such recognition has, in fact, distinctly set aside the 
claim of Christian nations, as such, to domineer over 
others in the name of an inherent superiority conferred 
on them by their religion. The force of such protest, 
the value of such recognition, would be increased, 
if, at the same time that Turkey entered the Euro- 
pean councils, Eussia, nominally of the same religion 
as Western Europe, were excluded from them. And 
besides this indirect advantage, by admitting Turkey 
the statesmen of the West would gain the further one 
of placing themselves in direct contact with the head 
of Mohammedanism, and so generally, through such 
intermedium, with the East. It is probable that in the 
immediate future the need of a closer mutual action 
will be increasingly felt. The complication of inter- 
national relations is every day growing ; and there is 
growing at the same time the necessity for greater 
power of dealing with it. No proper opportunity of 
increasing such power should be neglected. 

Still, neither historical nor political considerations 
would justify us in regarding Turkey as an integral 



THE WEST. 19 

part of the West. Whatever the advantages of such 
a view, they must be foregone rather than weaken by 
any immature concession the cohesion of the Western 
body, abeady far too weak. If I have dwelt on the 
superior claims of Turkey, it has been at once to draw 
out into fuller light the essential nullity of those of 
Russia, and to offer a contribution in aid of those who 
on other grounds, more or less empirically, yet in my 
judgment rightly, uphold the integrity and independ- 
ent action of the Turkish Empire. No Western poli- 
tician should hasten its downfall, or its withdrawal 
even from Europe. Its freedom of initiative should 
be scrupulously respected. 

Be this as it may, the removal of Russia and 
Turkey from the state-system of Europe rectifies at 
once a not uncommon error, due partly to an excess 
of national self- consciousness in the people, or rather 
the writers of the people, which encourages it, partly 
to a misconception of mediaeval history and an exag- 
geration of the importance of the German emperors, 
the heads of the so-called Holy Roman Empire. In 
so valuable a book as Heeren's work on the Political 
State-system of Europe, it is assumed that Germany 
is the central state ; and the idea is popular naturally 
in Germany, and fostered by certain tendencies in the 
minds of Englishmen. Germany is the central state 
if you look merely to the geographical form of Eu- 
rope and the position of Germany in reference to it. 
So it is even politically, or might be, if you allow 
Russia and the Eastern elements to be a part of 
political Europe in its true sense. But it ceases to 
be so either geographically or politically if you shut 
out the Eastern contingent. Then the true Western 
Europe is seen at once, by the most cursory inspec- 



20 THE WEST. 

tion of tlie map, to find its geographical centre in 
France. It finds its political centre there, as is con- 
fessed by all practical statesmen. France should be 
the central figure historically, were the intelligence 
of Europe rightly trained in historical knowledge. 
For it is not difficult to trace the cause of the histo- 
rical misconception relative to the German Emperor, 
nor is it difficult to see its correction. When, in the 
tenth century, the pressure of danger lay on the 
eastern frontier of Europe, on the Empire then vested 
in the hands of Otho, as the representative of the 
greater emperors, fell the burden of defending that 
frontier, and with the burden naturally was given 
the preeminence. But the danger once over, the 
eccentric importance ceased with it, and the principal 
place, if we distinguish real importance from nominal 
dignity, reverted to France. No one would claim in 
the Crusades the first place for Germany, and such 
concession rightly estimated is decisive. 

I proceed now to a closer analysis of Western 
Europe disembarrassed from the complication of 
Kussia. It still contains, in its more strict histo- 
rical, as it did in its looser practical conception, five 
great Powers, which must be separately and accu- 
rately examined — France, Italy, Spain, England, and 
Germany; for Austria and Prussia must merge in 
Germany in any proper conception of the West. It 
was said of Italy that she was but a geographical 
expression. It might be much more truly said of 
Germany, as she at present exists. She is a threefold 
power, and sadly encumbered with non- Germanic ele- 
ments. On the difficult mutual relations of the three ; 
on the delicate position in respect to one another of 
the two most concentrated and most powerful states, 



THE WEST. - 21 

on the manifold complications which the composition 
of these two presents, I need not here touch. It is 
desirable that the Germanic element in Western Eu- 
rope should be, as strictly as is practically possible, 
detached from all alien adjuncts, that it should re- 
nounce all oppressive action on its neighbours east or 
south. It is as German, whether united more closely 
or in some such union as at present, that they should 
enter into the Western system. The cry for an imited 
Germany has so far a truth in it as it tends to simplify 
the position. It is unwise as it is out of date. It is 
a mere political solution of difficulties, and the pro- 
blem, which is the real task of Europe, is social and 
moral. Its anachronism is patent on the face of it. 
It is a cry not merely for internal union, but for in- 
ternal union for the purposes of a retrograde external 
policy. It is a demand for aggrandisement, relative 
power, commercial and political importance, and that 
irrespective of the just claims of others. Poland, 
Hungary, or Italy, are not considered but as con- 
ducing to German greatness. There is no objection 
on the score of danger to Europe in an united Ger- 
many. If it tended to secure a better government, 
to remove oppressive distinctions and restrictions; if 
it tended to the real internal welfare of the German 
people, it should be cordially welcomed. It is from 
the point of view of that people's genuine interests 
that it may be questioned whether it is not a waste 
of time ; a movement which the actual state of opi- 
nion in Europe makes natural and intelligible, but 
which is not the less to be regretted. 

Whatever may be the decision on this point, it is 
with Germany as a whole that we are concerned when 
we are considering it in the composition of the West, 



22 • THE WEST. 

as the fifth great Power. For the moment I omit 
France and England — as by common consent essential 
members of the West, both in the present and the 
past — and proceed to the consideration of the two re- 
maining states, whose position needs some notice and 
rectification. Italy is, in the main, reconstituted as 
a kingdom. The course of events since 1859 has 
tended uniformly in one direction ; her internal union 
into one state, and her restoration to her rank as a 
great European power. She is not yet fully placed 
in that position in the diplomatic world ; but daily she 
is assuming more prominence in the calculations of 
statesmen, and the most recent change has given an 
increased impetus to the movement. But this new 
diplomatic attitude, if I may be allowed the expres- 
sion, is by no means necessary to Italy to enable her 
to count as an indispensable constituent of the West. 
United or disunited, she can never be any thing but 
such constituent. Her claim rests on far too sound 
an historical ground. She has too profoundly guided 
and modified the whole of Western civilisation. The 
second ultimately in real importance of the great 
powers, Italy need wait for no material concentration ; 
she is certain of recognition as her just inheritance 
from which no jealousy could exclude her, even if 
any jealousy existed. Still, though the place of Italy 
is thus secure, it is not the less important that, in 
the present, for the welfare of the rest of Europe, 
it should be openly recognised, that in all common 
Western actions her cooperation should be sought. 
The importance of this lies in the definiteness so 
given to the constitution of the West. 

The case of Spain is similar hi all essential par- 
ticulars. She too must be reinstated in her full 



THE WEST. 23 

membership. Her closest cooperation must be in- 
vited. Her complete recognition as one of the five 
great Powers is urgently demanded of Western states- 
men. Some years ago I urged on the English go- 
vernment and nation, in the interest alike of Spain, 
of England, and of Europe, the restitution to Spain 
of Gibraltar. I urge it not less now. It is not less 
now, than it was then, the duty of England to restore 
it. But I would urge more now. I would urge, that 
is, the adoption of a consistent policy of conciliation 
and support towards Spain, of which the cession of 
Gibraltar should be the first act and symbol. It were 
for the good of Europe that the statesmen of Eng- 
land should take the initiative m replacing Spain in 
her legitimate place ; legitmiate, that is, viewed by 
the light of historical continuity, and not simply 
under the narrower teaching of mere actual circum- 
stances. No rivalry has been more fatal to Spain 
than that of England, though none has been more 
susceptible of palliation, or even justification. No 
nationahty is more alienated from us than the Spa- 
nish ; and justly alienated, by our selfish, haughty, 
and oppressive abuse of our power. Nothing could 
exert so beneficial an influence on the reconstitution 
of European union, nothing could so eiFectually tend 
to heal the antagonism now prevailing between the 
branches of the Western Family, as a smcere effort — 
and its sincerity might be tested by its success — on 
the part of England, Teutonic, Northern, and Pro- 
testant England, to restore to its due honour and 
importance the Latm, Southern, and Catholic Spain. 
As a result of these changes, we have, as the five 
great Powers of the West, France, Italy, Spahi, Eng- 
land, and Germany. But this simple enumeration is 



24 THE WEST. 

insufficient for my present purpose. Only one of the 
inrve is quite simple ; Italy, as a geographical expression, 
and the Italian population are coextensive, for Italy 
has neither dependencies nor colonies. She is free from 
all the evil associations which adhere to those names 
in the case of the others. Still, for the sake of sym- 
metry, and not also without a real political value in 
the change, I would at present speak rather of the 
Italian people than of Italy. The pressure which is 
forcing on the Italians a political concentration simi- 
lar to that of their powerful neighbours, — which is 
giving them a large army, a large fleet, a large debt, 
all the attributes, in short, of a first-rate European 
power, — is, it may be hoped, but temporary. Her full 
independence once attained, Italy may resume her long 
tradition of a moral, not political union, her highly 
articulate national existence, rather than remam a 
strongly centralised government. It is deeply to be 
regretted that the need of complete independence is 
interrupting her history, and forcing her to renounce 
for a time the valuable legacy of the past ; whicli in 
the past, it is true, has been the cause of so much 
suffering, but which in the present and future might 
serve her much, — I allude to the coexistence of a 
number of real states, large enough for all the ob- 
jects of a state, not large enough to stifle all civic 
feeling. The loss of this organisation is the great 
evil to Italy, and through her to Europe, of the re- 
tention of Yenice by Austria. It has a tendency to 
result for Italy in a great political aberration. 

As Italy for the Italian, so France stands for 
the French population wherever found, in or out of 
France proper, in colonies belonging to France or in 
colonies planted by her, but now owning another po- 



THE WEST. 25 

litical allegiance, such as Lower Canada. Any such 
offshoots of a nation are, relatively to the rest of the 
world, still integral parts of it, sympathising with it, 
and acting as conductors of its influence to the rest. 
They form, equally with the parent state, a part of 
the West, as we conceive it. So that it is seen to 
be composed, not of five definite political unities or 
states, but of five freer and larger social unities or 
populations, of which the closer and more concen- 
trated unities are but the parts and centres. Nor 
is the social unity confined to the parent state and its 
colonies ; there may be other essential constituents 
of it which are independent states, and have been 
always such historically ; e. g, the French portion of 
Belgium is a part of France, in the largest sense of 
the term. 

Similarly, the Spanish populations both in the Old 
and New World — not merely the Spanish Peninsula, 
Spain and Portugal that is, but the vast Spanish and 
Portuguese offshoots in Central and South America 
or elsewhere — are the equivalent of Spain, as part of 
Western Europe. So again Avith England, which en- 
ters the European concert as the short expression for 
the Anglo - Saxon populations of the United States, 
not less than for its own immediate colonies, Cana- 
dian or Australasian. Lastly, the same holds good 
of Germany. The German population comprises not 
merely Germany proper, but its natural appendages 
— Holland, German Switzerland, the Scandinavian 
kingdoms, and any colonial adjuncts, whether sepa- 
rate colonies or large masses of German settlers. 

If, to make my meaning clear, I have thus in de- 
tail pointed out that the West means the collective 
unity formed by the five populations above men- 



26 THE WEST. 

tioned, for the sake of convenience of expression I 
shall use, when speaking of them, the more concen- 
trated terms, the names of the representative nucleus 
of each population. One remark I would, however, 
premise : what has been said of Italy applies with 
equal force to the others in the future. Their great 
political concentration, such as it exists in France, 
Spain, or England, has had doubtless, and may have 
still, a relative value. But in the future it mil be 
otherwise ; and the clisgregation of Italy is but the 
type of the political order which is equally desirable 
for all. Ultimately, it ought as little to be the aim 
of the statesman to keep together the large national 
aggregates actually in existence, as it is to reunite 
those which have been separated during the last 
three centuries, Holland with Spain, for instance ; 
the United States "svith England ; or the Spanish set- 
tlements with the mother country. Such reunion is 
never dreamt of. All English politicians are aware 
that the separation of the American colonies in the 
last century will at no very distant period be fol- 
lowed by that of the Canadian and Australasian ; and 
they acquiesce in this fact. The mere distance offers 
an insuperable obstacle to permanent union. It will 
remain for the future to see whether distance alone 
is the necessary condition of separation ; whether 
size may not equally be a sound reason ; whether 
the principle adopted as the regulator of the mag- 
nitude of states should not be the real adequate 
securing of the highest objects of state union. The 
older division of Great Britain was but an anticipa- 
tion. In one form or another it will reappear. So 
that in wishing for Italian decentralisation, for the 
separate existence of her traditional smaller states, I 



THE WEST. 27 

am but applying to her immediately what I consider 
to be the desirable political organisation ultimately 
for her compeers. 

In the mean time, however, whilst the larger 
national aggregates remain, their action, as centres 
of the corresponding populations, will be the most 
powerful, will be for a time the only action that can 
be sensibly felt. In other words, it is Western Eu- 
rope, m the narrower, more ordinary sense, which 
for some time must be the active agent, the minister 
of the great purposes of the whole Western commu- 
nity. It is desirable to avoid vagueness, no less in 
action than in thought. The other states are too 
distant, and in many points m too diiFerent a situa- 
tion, to act much at present. So much may be said 
without prejudice to their legitimate and naturally 
increasing influence. The great American Union, 
reconstituted in its ^fuU integrity, must have great 
weight in all Western collective action. But the 
exercise of its power will be the more salutary, if it 
is exerted in presence of a reconstituted Western 
centre, not brought to bear on isolated, and in the 
main antagonistic, governments. 

I spoke above of the inheritance of Greek intel- 
lectual culture, Roman organisation, the Mediaeval 
Catholic Feudalism, and the at once destructive and 
reconstructive revolution of modern Europe during 
the ^ve last centuries. It was this inheritance which 
was made the foundation on which to raise the poli- 
tical and social superstructure of the West. It was 
the having shared, in some greater or less degree, in 
this inheritance which constituted the legitimate title 
to form a part of the collective unity. It is obvious 
that the five states included have not shared in an 



28 THE WEST. 

equal degree. The transmission of the Western tra- 
ditions has been more direct and unbroken with some 
than with others ; more direct and unbroken in 
France, Italy, and Spain, than in England and Ger- 
many. Again, it has been less impaired in France and 
Italy than in Spain, in England than in Germany. 
Still these differences are differences of degree only. 
If Germany had the misfortune to lose the benefits of 
subjugation by Rome, and consequently the fertilising 
mfluences of Roman civilisation, the loss has been in 
a large measure, though far from wholly, repaired 
by the conquests of Charlemagne and her subsequent 
admixture with Western political action. Her m- 
heritance has been indirect, but it is sufficient. If 
by the Saxon conquest England lost the advantages 
her incorporation into the Roman Empire had pro- 
mised her, by the action of the Papacy under Gregory 
the Great, and by the Norman invasion, she regained 
to a great extent her position. The indirectness of 
the transmission does not invalidate her claim to be 
an mtegral part of Western Europe. 

But there are two European states which require 
a separate mention, as standing on a distinct ground. 
Both have a definite history and definite relations 
with Western civilisation; both are incompletely, it 
is true, yet necessarily adjuncts of the West. The 
two I mean are Greece and Poland. It were impos- 
sible to exclude Greece from our consideration; for 
to Greece we owe the first great step in our con- 
tinuous movement — the intellectual culture of the 
race. The poetry, the philosophy, the science of 
Western Europe are inexplicable without Greece. 
Sharing nominally in the Roman incorporation, she 
was really alien and averse to it, and was essentially 



THE WEST. 29 

not benefited by it. She wholly missed the benefits 
of Catholicism ; nor could she accept those of Moham- 
medanism. She remains, therefore, incomplete, un- 
developed; yet, by virtue of her past, she interests 
Western Europe, and is a fit object for the earliest 
application of her beneficent protection. The hete- 
rogeneous protectorate, which is the expression of 
this relation, and under which she has suiFered as 
much as she has profited, is destined to give way to 
a more Avisely instituted direction, one more purely 
Western, and as such free from the conflicting inte- 
rests which have sacrificed Greece to other political 
antagonism. 

It is purely by her conversion to Catholicism that 
Poland stands out from her more immediate kindred. 
It is by her services as the bulwark of Europe against 
the barbarians that she has an especial claim on the 
goodwill of the West. She is inseparable from its 
past history. Yet that goodwill cannot be shown by 
war. There is no justification for such a course; 
there is equally none for abandoning her. A bene- 
ficial influence in her destiny can only, however, be 
exercised from without when the powers which could 
exercise it have themselves been modified. In the 
mean time Poland, which in the main suflers from her 
anarchical political constitution and from her belated 
social order, must look to her own action, and guide 
herself by the experience of more advanced nations. 
When the time is come for a collective Western ac- 
tion, it would seem natural that, as in the past, so 
again, such action should take effect through Ger- 
many. Once thoroughly Western in its sympathies, 
disengaged at once from subservience to Russia, and 
from all cravings for aggrandisement eastward, Ger- 



30 THE WEST. 

many will neither seek to retain the parts of Poland 
which are now incorporated into her aggregate, nor 
connive at the absorption of the rest by Eussia. 
Through Germany as its organ the West will assume 
towards Poland, under better auspices and on more 
sure grounds, the attitude which the Popes have 
honourably assumed in the worst times. With more 
powerful efficacy, the intervention, so directed in 
favour of Poland, will replace the isolated and there- 
fore inefficacious sympathy of France. 

So much for the full explanation of the term ''the 
West." In its widest as well as in its most concen- 
trated meaning, it is fairly before the reader. An 
attentive consideration will show that so vast a col- 
lective existence can only be held together by a moral 
union. A common inheritance, a community of tra- 
ditions and of the feelings and sympathies consequent 
thereon, a common faith, a common object — such, 
and not any outward political or material bonds, 
must constitute the tie. Such community must evi- 
dently be first realised by the more central portions ; 
the stress of instruction and guidance rests on them. 
Once realised in some approximative degree by them, 
it will rapidly spread to the more distant portions. 

The union above indicated has its prototype in 
history. Mediaeval Europe felt itself to be one in 
this sense under the Catholic-Feudal organisation. 
There was then a moral and spiritual union of 
Western Christendom, entirely different from that 
which had bound together substantially the same 
extent in the Eoman period. The more we study 
mediaeval records, the more we see the completeness 
and the strength which then characterised the inter- 
communion of Europe. The isolation of the several 



THE AYEST. 31 

nations and their mutual antipathies date in their 
fidl force from the break-up of the Middle Ages in 
the fourteenth century. They have been intensified 
and systematised by the so-called Eeformation of 
the sixteenth. For our purpose it is sufficient that 
a different state — a state of communion and sympa- 
thy — was once the order of Europe. For its attain- 
ment once makes it probable that it may be attained 
again, if it can be shown, as it can be and has been, 
that the causes of its first failure can be avoided, and 
that the grounds on which its partial success rested 
still exist. It is for our own generation, and the 
generations which shall follow it, to form again the 
intercommunion of Western Euroj)e in the interest of 
the whole human race, and in obedience to the teach- 
ings of the past. It may be re^dved on a surer basis 
and with greater closeness. The basis to be surer 
must be rational and real, not fictitious ; the greater 
closeness may be gained by substituting the definite 
conception of the West for the indefinite and an- 
archical term of Christendom. The weakness in- 
herent in this term is apparent from the fact that 
it never really included all the nations which in be- 
lief were Christian ; as is sufficiently seen by the 
fourth crusade, when the armies of Europe were 
diverted from their legitimate enemies to attack and 
plunder the metropohs and empire of their Eastern 
coreligionists. 

The historical probability of the union granted, 
the means of attaining it are simple in statement, if 
difficult of execution. There is the direct action of 
statesmen and governments based on their having 
mastered the conception. They might exert a most 
powerful influence by removing existing obstacles 



32 THE WEST. 

and familiarising the nations tliey direct with the 
idea of a new European polity. 

Anticipating, accompanying, and supporting their 
action, a rightly directed public opinion might spread 
its results rapidly throughout the peoples immediately 
affected by it. Both together, the action of the states- 
man and the opinion of the peoples would work har- 
moniously to the further object — to the discovery of 
the ultimate means of insuring a sound foundation 
for the work initiated by the convergence of their 
respective influences. Such ultimate means are the 
institution and development of the education, and the 
calling into existence the body which should organise 
the education, of the West. Enough, if I here indicate 
this fundamental requisite for the new order, which 
can only rest as its prototype — the Catholic order — 
did, on a community of faith. It was indispensable 
to indicate it, were it only to preclude any supposition 
that the bond which is at present so much vaunted, 
that of commercial interest, was in any degree relied 
on. It were unwise to refuse to the tie created by 
commerce a certain negative influence in favour of 
peace. But men are never really united by interests, 
nor are nations. Morally, interests are more calcu- 
lated to separate. It is important that we should not 
be led astray by the teaching now so prevalent, and 
substitute a delusive connection for a solid one. The 
ineflicacy of this commercial tie may be well appre- 
ciated by seeing to what it leads in regard to other 
nations not professedly included by it. The common 
interest of those whom it connects finds its expression 
in the most oppressive action towards those without. 
It is but a collective selfishness, and naturally works 
to selfish ends. 



THE WEST. 33 

I touch but slightly on such a point, as it will 
find its full consideration elsewhere in this series of 
essays. But if commerce is rejected as the founda- 
tion of Western order, as being inherently and neces- 
sarily, when left to itself, negative, however positive 
in outward semblance, it follows a fortiori that no 
mere negation can be accepted in its default. Yet it 
is on a mere negation that the State-system of Europe 
actually rests. The Balance of Power, which avowedly 
for the last two centuries has been the active guiding 
principle of Western policy, is and can be nothing else. 
It is a provisional artifice — the expression of mutual 
jealousy, the diplomatic remedy for a transitional state 
of disorder. It implies a state of compromise, not of 
cooperation ; and as cooperation is the aim of human 
society in all its forms, its temporary substitute must 
ultimately disappear. Be so much said without im- 
peachment of the statesman-like prudence which in- 
vented, has subsequently applied, and still clings to, 
the balance of power, as, in the absence of any other 
formula, the best relatively. 

For I cannot think that the new principle, what- 
ever its justification, whatever its attractions, which 
has been largely adopted by what is called the Liberal 
school in Europe, and is now coquetted with, now 
trampled on, by the ambition of its governments, 
off'ers a less unsound, if more specious, basis of or- 
ganisation. I allude to the principle of nationalities. 
I do not wish to extenuate, much less to deny, 
the evils for which this principle is the proffered 
remedy. Still the new formula, if examined mth 
attention, is but a variation of the old. It is the old 
thing under a new name, with the added evil that 
it enlists, thus rebaptised, the sympathies of whole 



34 THE WEST. 

populations, instead of remaining simply an affair for 
tlie colder reason of diplomatists and statesmen. Each 
separate nationality aims at concentration, independ- 
ence, and strength, but with the object of asserting 
itself against all the rest. The violent compression 
which keeps together discordant aggregates I regret 
as much as any one. But I can see no real cure of 
such evils in the immediate assertion of feelings such 
as have animated Germany in the recent contest with 
Denmark. For the purely transitional state through 
which Europe is passing, the older principle is suffi- 
cient to maintain a certain order; and it were a 
waste of time to endeavour to substitute in its place 
any other which at bottom should be equally provi- 
sional. For, apart from all abuses of it by its advo- 
cates, the new one is, considered in itself, an arrange- 
ment for separation, not a bond of union. True, it 
may be urged that such separation will lead to union, 
but it can only do so indirectly, and there are direct 
means available; and as there are these means, it 
seems unadvisable to fall back on any indirect and 
negative method. 

Both principles — that of the balance of power, as 
well as that of nationalities — have a relative value. 
Either might have been a groundwork for European 
order. One has been adopted as such ; and as neither 
is capable of being a definitive settlement, it is un- 
advisable at the present period to replace it by the 
other. It is on purely relative grounds that the lat- 
ter is set aside as a substitute. In fact, so purely 
relative are the grounds that there are cases in which 
its immediate adoption may be advocated. Applied 
to a highly civilised community, such as Italy, the 
national principle is indefeasible. It would, if en- 



THE WEST. 35 

forced at once, conduce liighly to peace and order in 
Europe. If enforced in the European dominions of 
Turkey, it would be a serious political error ; it would 
but tend to disorder. 

Both principles are inadequate, and equally so, if 
looked on as final solutions. They are both of them 
remedies far too material and political to meet diffi- 
culties which are social and moral, and which as such 
demand a social and moral treatment. They have 
not in them any tendency to harmonise opinions and 
convictions ; they have not even any tendency to fur- 
ther concordant action, much less to promote sym- 
pathies. And the absence of such tendencies is their 
conclusive condemnation in the eyes of all who allow 
that only on harmonious opinion and conviction can 
enduring sympathy be based, and that without such 
sympathy no lasting convergence of action is con- 
ceivable. 

The political conception "the West," explamed 
in detail, the principles on which European order ac- 
tually rests, or is wished to rest, set aside, the nature 
of the union to be aimed at having been stated, it 
remains for me to consider what is the aim set before 
this collective personality. Shortly, I may state it ta 
be the peaceful action on the rest of the race, with 
the purpose of raising, or enabling its various con- 
stituents to rise, in due order to the level it has itself 
attained. Such a body would stand forth as the mo- 
del at once and director of the rest. Duly organised 
within, conscious of its functions and obligations, it 
would appreciate the wants and situation of those 
without it; and, without any pressure or unwar- 
ranted interference with their legitimate independ- 
ence of action, it would be ready to help them in 



36 THE WEST. 

their onward course. Orderly within itself, and keep- 
ing order by a joint effort on the common ground of 
the race, the sea, it would institute systematic con- 
nections with the other nations or populations. The 
basis of such intercourse would not, as now, be mainly, 
much less purely, industrial and for its own benefit. 
There would be no slighting of the advantages and 
uses of commerce; but commerce would hold its 
proper, entirely secondary and subordinate, position, 
available as a stimulus and guarantee for continuity 
of relations. The religious missions of the present are 
elements of disturbance, and offer no compensation for 
such disturbance ; they are engaged, in the main, in 
the hopeless attempt to spread an exclusive and un- 
sympathetic faith, which as such has no chance of 
being accepted. Their only recommendation is their 
motive and their general idea; but neither the one 
nor the other prevents their being, in their leading 
results, a mere evil. Superseding them, the missions 
of the future will hold a different language, aim at 
widely different objects, and have a very different 
efficacy. In full sympathy with the past and present 
intellectual, social, and religious condition of those 
whom they address, equally whether monotheistic, 
polytheistic, or fetishist, they will take them each at 
the point at which they find them, accept their actual 
state, and lead them on by an orderly development. 
Such peaceful and sympathetic action, made intelli- 
gible by a previous cessation of the violent and frau- 
dulent intercourse which now repels all tendencies to 
friendliness, will be met by the unreserved admission 
of the superiority of the West. The nations to whom 
it speaks will allow its moral and intellectual pre- 
eminence as completely as they even now admit its 



THE WEST. 37 

material, mechanical, and active predominance. They 
will have no repugnance to disinterested advice, free 
from all tendency to disturb or design of conquest. 
Treated mth courtesy and respect, not, as now, with 
ill-concealed contempt, they Avill reciprocate an inter- 
course from which both derive good, as surely as they 
now reject, so far as they dare, the interchange of de- 
pendence on one side and haughtiness on the other. 

The experience of the past has repeatedly shown 
that this is no idle dream; that there is on the 
part of the less advanced races a strong disposition 
to appropriate the progress of the more favoured, 
and to be grateful to the agents of its communica- 
tion. And this is true, not merely of simple bar- 
barous tribes, whose propensity is almost to worship 
the white man as a god ; but it is true also of those 
nations which have attained a high degree of orga- 
nised pohtical and social existence. It is demon- 
strable that their exclusiveness, such as it is, has 
been the result of long-proved incapacity on the part 
of the Western nations to associate with them on 
terms of mutual courtesy and fair reciprocity of 
advantage. Their exclusiveness has been justified 
in the past, and is still justifiable ; and were the 
statesmen of Europe not the mere tools of its com- 
mercial rapacity, it would be respected, and, with 
slight modifications, accepted and enforced. But 
with a change in the attitude, and consequently in 
the action of Western nations, such exclusiveness 
would fall from the mere absence of any adequate mo- 
tive for its continuance. The natural mutual attrac- 
tions of the difi*erent portions of the race would come 
into full play, and with the sense of security in their 
iQtercourse would come the conviction of its utility. 



38 THE WEST. 

I need not dwell on the advantages to be derived 
from an intercourse so conducted, so far as concerns 
the less advanced nations. I have but to sketch in 
principle and in outline its nature and tendency. 
That done, I may turn to its reaction on the more 
advanced, on the Western populations. That this 
reaction would be most beneficial, there can be no 
doubt. In mediasval times Western Christendom 
was united under the direction of the Papacy in the 
Crusades. The Popes felt that in cooperation in a 
great external object lay a remedy for internal evils. 
I pass over all discussion of the object of those ex- 
peditions, all discussion of their justification ; I pass 
over the direct results of bloodshed and misery. 
With all their weakness and imperfection, they in a 
measure answered their end — they united Europe, and 
they were fraught with collateral benefits of great 
importance. Curiously enough, they tended on the 
whole rather to the union than the disunion of the 
hostile parties. Contact led to a more correct appre- 
ciation by the antagonists of one another. A just 
estimate of the general effects of the Crusades allows 
them to have been beneficial. 

If, in more modern times, we substitute peaceful 
agencies for war, the spirit of conciliation for that of 
antagonism, the wish to raise, not the design to con- 
quer or even exterminate, it would be difiicult to 
overestimate the gain that would accrue to Western 
Europe from such cooperation. In it might be found 
an adequate sphere for all its energies, a large and 
wholesome gratification of all its nobler impulses, a 
powerful stimulus to its own advance, and more com- 
plete internal organisation and harmony. To form 
part of a body cooperating peacefully for such great 



THE WEST. 39 

ends, as the recognised instrument of Humanity, were 
surely a sufficient distinction, a sufficient satisfaction 
of the less relative instincts of national pride and am- 
bition. Exorbitant as they now are, they might rest 
in what is hereby offered them. Their full gratifica- 
tion in their present shape is evidently impossible. 
They exclude one another. This has long been felt 
to be true. The dream of universal empire has long 
since past away, and the partial gratification afforded 
by being the first among many peers can only be 
attained by one, while the struggle for either com- 
plete or partial satisfaction, from its selfish character, 
has no tendency to raise, but rather to degrade. But 
in this coordinate union for the common good of the 
whole, the instincts above mentioned may receive an 
adequate development, and may be turned into useful 
instruments. We of the West, the advanced guard 
of Humanity, are citizens of no mean city ; not low- 
ered by narrow and local aspirations ; not isolated by 
national selfishness ; not degraded by anti-social ambi- 
tion. The barriers of religious, national, commer- 
cial separation fall before the new unity. We cease 
to be solely or primarily members of such or such a 
Western nation, England or France. We become 
primarily Western, with an immunity from all the 
evils which have clung around the exclusive promi- 
nence given to the more restricted associations ; free 
from the poverty which now attaches to all our political 
conceptions, reheved from the antagonisms which ren- 
der fertile of dangers our actual political and inter- 
national order. The ties and obligations of the new 
relation exert a healthy influence on all our thought 
and action, not extinguishing, nor even lessening our 
love of our separate countries or states, but correcting 



40 THE WEST. 

its excess, and by placing it in its due subordination, 
at once purifying and strengthening it. 

The policy here advocated on international ques- 
tions meets and in a considerable degree sympathises 
with each of the two conflicting tendencies of English 
opinion on such matters. 

The school at present in the ascendant preaches 
absolute non-intervention in Europe. It asserts the 
duty of concentrating all our attention and our action 
on ourselves and our own interests. This abstinence 
from all interference is the final result of a long 
and sad experience, the fruit of our mature wisdom. 
Those who proclaim this negation of a policy are 
naturally jubilant over our recent conduct towards 
Denmark as the sign of its triumph. Yet it would 
almost seem as if it were only in Europe, and on a 
calculation of the profits and losses of our interven- 
tion there, that this complete inaction is desirable. 
Where interference is profitable and easy, and brings 
with it commercial advantages, it would seem that it 
may be condoned. Be this as it may, the avowed 
object is peace and abstention. The only flaw in the 
doctrine is the being too absolute ; otherwise we 
sympathise with the object. We too aim at peace, 
consider war as a blunder and anachronism, though 
aware that it may even yet be necessary. We would 
act as much as possible by peaceful means, but we 
would act, and that in the interest of others. We 
do not accept the doctrine, that the pursuit by each 
nation of its own interests will practically lead to 
the harmonious adjustment of all human difiiculties. 

The opposite school feels indignant at such re- 
nunciation on the part of England. It recoils from 
the consequences of its abstention, but it recoils solely 



THE WEST. 41 

from the consideration of its effects on England. Its 
language is imperial. The empire we have won must 
be preserved, as to recede were to degrade ourselves, 
were to dim our high consciousness of power and 
greatness, and cramp all our nobler energies. In 
short, England needs empire for the sake of England. 
This imperial policy is more directly immoral than 
the other, for it sacrifices with the quietest deter- 
mination all the claims of others. Other nations are 
but to be the pedestal on which we may raise the 
proud statue of imperial England. 

Yet this immoral and essentially degrading policy 
has a certain truth in it, and one which demands 
sympathy. The different policy I advocate offers its 
disciples a sphere of action, the consciousness of a 
noble place, and a great purpose in the world's affairs. 
They are right, surely, in thinking that it cannot be 
a sound conclusion which involves so entire a rupture 
with the past, with all our historic tradition. They 
are right in thinking that great sacrifices should be 
incurred on fitting occasions, and that there are such 
occasions. A highly social existence is the proper 
existence for man, whether in states or individuals; 
and such an existence involves perpetual duties to 
others and perpetual sacrifices on behalf of others. 
The opposite theory is inhuman, and contradicts all 
the obligations flowing from our position as a fact, 
our actual membership in Humanity. 

The primary requisite is to realise the conception 
of this organisation of the Western World and the 
new policy and the new obligations which are its 
natural results. Once become familiar in clear and 
definite outline, it will rapidly exercise its proper in- 
fluence. The ground is prepared for it. The failure 



42 THE WEST. 

of the older system, the need for some new one — - 
something which may guide us to a reconstruction — ■ 
are largely felt. Many obstacles in the way of its 
acceptance have been removed; the intenser feeling 
of national self-assertion at the expense of others has 
been, there is reason to think, losing its hold. There 
is abundance of it left ; but it becomes more and more 
repugnant to a larger number. In this country, — in 
which at present more than in any other lies, not the 
power of guidance, but the power of obstruction, 
corresponding to the immense influence she might 
exercise in forwarding what is useful, — observers 
recognise a change of opinion on all questions of inter- 
national policy, so far as Europe is concerned^ a 
change in the direction of moderation. 

The conception of the West once realised, the 
first task is its reorganisation withhi its own limits, 
the reconstruction of the proper relations of its dif- 
ferent national constituents. The second and simul- 
taneous task is the reconstruction of the social order 
in each of these constituents. During the period of 
this double process, the main feature of the policy 
towards all without must be a wise abstention, the 
steady discouragement, even the prohibition of all 
attempts at premature interference on the part of its 
own members or of others. As much as possible all 
irregular action, all disturbing influences, should be 
removed. Respect for the organisations that exist is 
the first cardinal principle, the simplest obligation, on 
those who cannot off*er a substitute. Such should be 
the action of Western statesmen and diplomatists in 
dealing with the Mohammedan and Polytheistic East. 
Their only active interference should be to repress 
with vigour the freebooting tendencies of European 



THE WEST. 43 

commerce. The simplest way would be to withdraw 
all protection from the unfair trader. Let him be 
given up to the justice of those on whom at present 
he preys. But it would be better still to exercise a 
vigorous surveillance on the commercial world, and, 
above all, never to lend support to their encroach- 
ments. 

A comparatively short course of such a moderate 
and just policy would restore a right feeling between 
the East and West. And when the latter had in some 
approximate degree attained its own reconstitution, it 
would find no obstacles to its imparting its influence 
to the former. Its indirect influence is already great, 
in spite of all the grounds of repulsion. Remove 
these grounds, and this indirect influence will be 
found to have made the way smooth for the direct. 
So, for the common good of the present and the 
future of Humanity might be brought into active 
operation, the two great principles whose due and 
harmonious coordination would, I consider, meet our 
difficulties, — the Unity of the race and the Leader- 
ship vested in the West. 

RICHARD CONGREYE. 



Note on the United States of America, 



In the preceding Essay, with a view to the proper pro- 
portions of the subject, I have given but a few lines to the 
United States — the powerful confederation which in popular 
language monopolises the name of America. Many reasons 
seem to conspire to claim more for it. Its large popula- 
tion ; the rapidity, hitherto happily unparalleled, with w^hich 
that population increases ; the extent of its actual territory ; 
the possibility, nay, even the probability, of an extension 
of that territory, northwards and southwards, by peacefal 
annexation or by war ; the energy of its citizens ; their now 
proved capacity for great sacrifices and a long war; their 
endurance at once and their success; the political doctrines 
which America represents ; the social wellbeing which ma- 
terially she has attained; — all alike, and especially the two 
latter considerations, would seem to justify a greater pro- 
minence for her in the estimate alike of the practical states- 
man and of the political theorist. Add further, the accidental 
complication, that, by the want of right feeling and due fore- 
sight, the two leading Governments of the West have placed 
themselves on a footing, if not of hostility, yet of serious 
misunderstanding with the American Republic, rendering it 
more disposed naturally to assert its influence, and forcing 
on them an anxious consideration of the results of that in- 
fluence. 

Whatever the natm-e of this influence may prove to be, 
whatever the dangers we in England may incur in conse- 
quence of the blunders of our statesmen and the evil feelings 
of the governing classes which they represent, there is every 
reason to rejoice in the reconstitution of the American Union. 
Its dissolution on the grounds alleged, and with the objects 
actually avowed, would have been, so far as we can see, 
a great calamity. Both the issues of the struggle recently 



NOTE ON THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 45 

ended were important. The primary, as it were the official 
and national issue, the maintenance of the Union in its full 
integrity, was important for the welfare of the American 
people. The anarchical doctrine of state rights, as asserted, 
would, under the existing circumstances of America, have had 
most dangerous consequences. The framework of her social 
order is already but too ill-compacted. The second and more 
general issue, the existence or non-existence of slavery as 
an institution, was important in regard to the highest in- 
terests of Humanity. Its greater importance was seen in the 
way in which it gradually overrode and obscured the other. 
The industry of man, the basis of all society for the future, 
must be freed as soon as possible, and has been freed in 
America, from the stain of degradation, from all association 
of disgrace. 

Yet neither our legitimate admiration for the conduct 
of the American people, nor our high estimate both of its 
immediate power and of its future growth, may lead to any 
essential modification of the abstract political theory given 
above. Neither the language of her statesmen and her peo- 
ple, nor the acceptance of that language by some of our 
own statesmen, and largely also by the convictions of the 
English working-classes, — neither the one nor the other 
should induce us to admit her claim to be the latest outcome 
of the mature political wisdom of the race, the type to which 
all others must eventually conform. For America claims no 
less, it would seem ; she claims no less than to be the leader 
of the West towards new horizons of indefinite political and 
social progress. On one point only can that claim be ad- 
mitted — a point in some degree of form as regards some 
European governments, though a point of essential superi- 
ority as regards others. America stands before the world 
as the representative of republican government. I will not 
stay to dwell on the different forms of such government, 
nor on the distinctness of the two ideas. Democracy and 
Republicanism. I will acquiesce without qualification in 
the merit of the American position. As the greatest modern 
Republic, she is, and must be in the van ; for republican 



46 NOTE ON THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 

government, with all its noble associations and inherent 
advantages is, as we believe, the last word in human poli- 
tical institutions. Without any need for impatience, Europe 
is moving towards it. 

But this point of vantage conceded to America, in her 
fm'ther claims we cannot acquiesce. We cannot recognise 
any general leadership vested in her. The offspring, as an 
independent state, of a period of negation and dissolution ; 
the offspring also of a nation which is not by its antece- 
dents, or by its present condition, qualified to take the lead 
in human affairs; founded as she is on doctrines which 
neither she nor others can work into political utility ; pene- 
trated by revolutionary principles, which, as such, have 
only a transitional utility and can never be the basis of per- 
manent order ; requiring, as she does, as much, if not more, 
than any Western nation — more than most certainly — a com- 
plete revision of her theories of government and social order ; 
— ^America cannot be in any sense a guide or a model for 
the Western statesman or thinker. She may and will react 
powerfully, and in the main usefully, on Europe. In some 
respects she will react prejudicially, especially, I fear, on our 
own country; but to such reaction her influence must be 
limited in thought, as it will be in fact. Her great material 
wellbeing — the general diffusion, that is, of a state of material 
comfort and prosperity to which many European nations, 
most notably our own, are strangers — the more it is appre- 
ciated, the more useful it may be, in raising the status of 
the labourer every where. It is a fair source of pride to 
America, that nowhere does the poor man find such a com- 
pensation for his labour, so comfortable a home. It is this 
which in a degree justifies the language of admiration for 
American institutions which is so common in England. We 
see the masses of om- own hard-worked, ill-paid, and suffer- 
ing poor, whose sufferings and inadequate remuneration are 
largely the result of social mismanagement, of our defective 
social arrangements, and we compare them with the same 
classes in America, and we naturally feel admiration for the 
different conditions of society and political institutions under 



NOTE ON THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 47 

which so different a condition of the workman is attainable. 
But such admiration may carry us too far. By other means 
than those adopted by America must we work towards the 
end we aim at — and that end, it must be said, is not iden- 
tical with the end hitherto attained by America. A sound 
constitution of the industry of man is more possible even 
now on Eiuropean bases than on American. 

It is no part of my present plan to analyse at any length 
tlie phenomena of the American social order. All I wish to 
do is to indicate the grounds on which I think that they who 
would reorganise the Western World may not take that order 
as tlieir model. America must weigh heavily in the scales of 
international policy ; but she weighs by her mass, not by her 
ideas. This is but to say, in other words, that she will receive 
far more than she can give ; be guided rather than lead ; be 
influenced rather than influence. I have already stated that 
her industrial organisation is in no respect in advance of 
that of Em'ope. In none of the great divisions of human in- 
dustry would it seem that she can teach any thing ; and in 
one she is more completely disorganised than any other coun- 
try, not excepting our own. I allude to the relations of the 
employers and the employed, the capitalist and the workman. 
Partly from the influence of the empty revolutionary dogmas 
of the rights of man, and the equality of all men ; partly as 
the result of the unfortunate contact with slavery, which has 
left its impress on the North as on the South ; all the neces- 
sary subordination of man to man is a thing profoundly re- 
pugnant to the American mind. In one of the valuable series 
of letters contributed by a ^^ Yankee" to the Spectator^ there 
was a j)assage that showed this very clearly. The writer^I 
have not by me the passage, but am clear as to its general 
sense — spoke, and spoke with pride, of no native American 
being wiUing to hold the position of domestic servant. It was 
a degrading position in his eyes, as in those of his countrjTiien. 
The negro or the immigrant Irish alone were adapted for it. 
But if it is degrading for the servant, it would seem a duty 
on the part of the master to renounce for himself the benefits 
which he reaps from such degradation. To that conclusion 



48 NOTE ON THE UNITED STATES OF AMEEICA. 

the writer had not come. Yet it seems the logical one. The 
complete disturbance of human life which would result from 
the universal acceptance of this view — which is not confined to 
America, however — is a sufficient reason for its rejection prac- 
tically. Its theory is equally weak. The free and honourable 
service of man, the direct personal service I mean, on right 
conditions, is as noble a task for man to undertake, and as 
susceptible of defence by argument, as any other human insti- 
tution. The social order in which so fundamental a tradition 
of Humanity is ignored or rejected, is by virtue of that omis- 
sion shown to be deeply revolutionary, and, as such, incom- 
petent to lead in reconstruction. 

But if in the sphere of material interests we are to refuse 
the guidance of America, born and nurtured, as she has been, 
apart from the influences of feudalism, and open therefore to 
all the inspirations of nascent industrialism, it will be but too 
probable that, in other spheres of human thought and order, 
we can still less accept it, and so it is in fact. Politically, 
America, if we may trust those who speak and write for her, 
is bent, not merely with relation to immediate wants, but as a 
permanent conception, on forming one vast whole. The dis- 
gregation which I have advocated for the populations of the 
West would nowhere be received with more unquestionable 
repugnance than by the statesmen and people of the North 
American Union. Quite as much too as any Western popu- 
lation America has her attention concentrated on merely poli- 
tical, diverted from the more urgent social, objects ; and her 
social state is so far more defective than any other that, in the 
reaction from the evils of privilege, the proper relations of the 
different classes are inverted, and the natural leaders of so- 
ciety are forced, in great measure, to divest themselves of 
their function, and stand aside as spectators of the political 
action of others. 

Lastly, in the domain of the intellect, in relation to all 

he more general and higher conceptions of man, whether 

scientific, philosophical, or religious, America can claim, and, 

speaking broadly, does claim, no initiative. I imagine that 

in this all cultivated Americans would agree with me. It is 



NOTE ON THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 49 

from Western Europe that any impulse to progress in these 
depai'tments must in the main originate. Nothing can be a 
clearer proof of this than the evidently greater influence in 
America than in Europe of the religious ideas of the past. 
Judging by all the utterances during the late struggle, eman- 
cipation from those ideas is incomparably more advanced in 
Europe. 

I have confined myself to the simplest and shortest indica- 
tions of the general opinion advocated. To work them out 
would be out of place, as it would be to enter into any detailed 
considerations of the immediate or more distant future of the 
American Union. As necessarily a portion of the West, it 
will follow the same course as the rest ; it will acknowledge 
ultimately the same traditions, be modified by the same ideas, 
become organised on the same conceptions, and lend its 
powerful support to the propagation of that organisation. 

We who urge on England a more moderate and more just 
estimation of herself, who m-ge her renunciation of any claim 
to be the first nation of the world, her acceptance of the se- 
condary position accorded her by the whole of past history, 
who urge on her, lastly, to throw away the language of self- 
assertion, and concentrate her attention on her international 
duties, — we cannot be expected to hold a different language in 
relation to her great colony. We cannot recognise as valid 
in America claims which we reject on behalf of her parent. 
Xor can we recognise as sound, when relied on by American 
statesmen and writers, doctrines as to rights, international or 
political, which we wholly repudiate when they are put for- 
ward by Europeans. On both sides of the Atlantic the situ- 
ation is essentially the same ; it is modified for the worse in 
America by the necessary conditions of her youth and exjDan- 
siveness. On both sides the need is the same, a wise interna- 
tional cooperation, resting on due subordination, in the interest 
of the Vvdiole race ultimately, and with the immediate object 
of a thorough internal reconstruction. Such need is not less 
inrgent — if writers most favourable to her may be trusted — is 
even more m-gent in America than in any other nation of the 
Western World. R. C. 

E 



No. 11. 



ENGLAND AND FKANCE. 



BY 



FREDERIC HARRISOK 



ENGLAND AND FEANCE. 



Since the close of the Revolutionary war, the pivot 
upon which the politics of Europe have hiaged will 
be found in the relations of England with France. 
For fifty years this fact has been gaining in import- 
ance and distinctness. It has now, both here and 
abroad, modified the thoughts of writers, politicians, 
and the public. The events of each succeeding decade 
show with new force, that in union between the two 
great heads of the West lies the true protection to 
Europe against attack from without, against war 
from within; its best guarantee for freedom, peace, 
and progress. Notorious disunion between the two 
Powers has uniformly been the signal to Europe for 
intrigue, oppression, embroilment, and war. Order 
and progress generally have gained or lost just as 
this union has been intimate or weak. It may be 
said that, if this last half-century has been to Europe 
a period of almost unexampled prosperity and repose, 
it is because the first condition of both — union be- 
tween the heads of Western civilisation — has never 
been so nearly realised before. 



54 ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 

This union, however, has been at best but imper- 
fect and precarious. It has not rested on political 
doctrine or general conviction. Yet, rudely shaken 
as it has been, it has sufficed to protect us from ac- 
tual war, and, indeed, from any serious or protracted 
rupture. We may trust that each year of well-used 
peace makes war between England and France more 
and more improbable. It is yet, however, far from 
impossible. That it should be so, much remains to 
be accomplished in both countries. In both there 
must arise very different conceptions of the duties, 
the rights, and the true interests of nations ; a new 
sense of responsibility in public men and teachers ; a 
conviction here and in Europe that such a war would 
be the greatest of all European calamities; a belief 
that it would retard our progress for the life, at least, 
of a generation. 

A feeling between the two great neighbours, suf- 
ficiently friendly to preserve them from collision, has 
thus gradually grown stronger. It has not yet be- 
come strong enough to remove the constant recur- 
rence of quarrels, fanned from time to time by the 
craft or the folly of politicians and journalists in both 
countries. Nor has this feeling succeeded in staying 
that ceaseless undercurrent of jealousy, misunder- 
standing, and antagonism that crosses the main tide 
of goodwill which sets from shore to shore. Indefi- 
nite, unstable, and without root, the harmony be- 
tween England and France has been an instuict, and 
not a principle. If it has preserved us from great 
evils, it has not been able to achieve any grand suc- 
cess. It has sufficed for the calm ; it mil not bear 
the trial of the storm. 

It is the purpose of this Essay to inquire into the 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 55 

mode by which this union might be grounded on a 
permanent and solid base ; to ask what must be the 
conditions, what would be the results of a standing 
and definite alliance. The great European import- 
ance of any such union of England and France is this, 
that in an especial manner these two Powers repre- 
sent, if they do not guide, the grand movements of 
our actual state system. Whatever the intellectual 
and moral gifts of other races in Europe, for the time 
these two nations are the great political forces of the 
West. They are essentially coordinate, though not 
antagonistic. England represents tradition, stability, 
personal liberty, law, industrialism, and national in- 
dependence. France represents the Eevolution and 
its principles; the amalgamation of classes; the re- 
organisation of the social and the political system; 
the resettlement of the general state system ; the 
rights of nationalities; government at once popular 
in its origin and in its aims; rule in the interests 
of the many and not of the few. Each Power singly 
is constantly tempted to force its phase of progress 
extravagantly and exclusively — the influence of 
England from time to time being degraded to the 
level of commercial rapacity, industrial greed, and 
stolid conservatism ; the influence of France to that 
of military ambition, revolutionary disorder, or ty- 
ranny veiled under the name of public welfare. 

Now these two Powers, the natural complement 
of each other, can never combine their influence in 
any lasting or grand object, except for the general 
advantage of Europe.* Combined, they strengthen 

" This must be understood of the action of these Powers in Europe 
alone. Beyond its limits, and free from the restraints of their position 
towards our Continent, they occasionally combine in a joint oppression. 



56 ENGLAND AND FEANCE. 

the good tendencies of each other, and equally neu- 
tralise the evil. Opposed, they neutralise the good 
and exaggerate the evil. The jealousies which each 
arouses, when acting with vigour by itself, are calmed 
when that action is jointly pursued by both. The 
policy of France, when heartily in unison with Eng- 
land, can awaken no reasonable terrors amongst her 
neighbours. Backed by the champion, in Europe, of 
peace, order, personal and national liberty, France 
can promote her principles without her designs seem- 
ing charged with disorder and ambition. Actively 
supported by France, England appeals to the nations 
of Europe with a moral force which has no modern 
equivalent. With her Catholic democratic and mili- 
tary neighbour at her right hand, she stands up 
amongst the nations as the symbol of something 
more than selfish conservatism; she shakes off that 
dull dogmatism which has so often nullified her ac- 
tion and swung her round against her will to the 
party of blind resistance. England and France — 
the Teutonic Protestant parliamentary and industrial 
power side by side with the Latin Catholic revolu- 
tionary and dictatorial power — -represent together 
principles so various, and comprise the dominant 
forces so nearly, that in any policy in which they 
cordially agree no element of life is likely to be sa- 
crificed, Avhilst all are certain to be harmonised. 

]^o sooner, however, are the two representative 
Powers estranged than the principles which they em- 
body fall back, not so much into independent action 
as into inevitable collision. In the former case they 
were kept in something like joint action, however im- 
perfectly consolidated; in the latter they neutralise 
each other without any useful result. Divided, each 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 57 

seeks to maintain or promote its special lines of 
influence. Each, in the diplomatic language of the 
day, seeks for new allies, and forms alliances which 
of necessity are at once precarious and unnatural. 
Neither England nor France can find in Europe any 
equal and natural alliance except with each other. 
This broken, any other alliance is a fresh source of 
insecurity both to them and to Europe. As the 
separation of the two natural allies grows plainer, 
each more obstinately pursues its special tendencies 
and its national ambitions in schemes which forebode 
danger to Europe, and infallibly arouse the suspicions 
of the other. France agitates her neighbours with 
crude visions of a resettlement of the state system, 
partly revolutionary, partly autocratic; now she pa- 
rades her Catholicism, now her military prestige, 
now her democratic zeal ; now she is the chief of the 
Latin race, now the military arbiter of the West, now 
the apostle of the Revolution. England on her side 
at these moments assumes a part even more odious 
and hardly less pernicious. She prides herself on 
reducing every thing to dead-lock ; she professes 
a policy of inaction, negative, repressive, and criti- 
cal ; she constitutes herself the grand obstructive ; 
her diplomacy is one long non possumus ; she insists 
on every claim of mere legality, and suppresses 
every claim of moral right ; she bolsters up every 
abuse and every retrograde and rotten system ; 
she sinks into the blindest and most dogged con- 
servatism, and withdraws in a sort of sulky despair 
from the councils of Europe, to fling herself into 
the task of founding new empires in distant oceans, 
and plundering and trampling on races of a darker 
skin. Other interests in Europe she is content to 



58 ENGLAND AND FKANCE. 

abandon, satisfying herself with barren protests, with 
checkmating every movement for good or for bad, 
with forming cabals against France to prevent her 
from abusing the season of confusion and dead-lock 
which the indiiferejice of England herself has pro- 
duced. 

These are the seasons which the elements of re- 
action in Europe welcome as their special time of 
harvest. Under the shelter which England then 
affords to pure conservatism, the princes and the 
princelets of Germany grow bolder in their career 
of besotted misgovernment. Under the shelter of 
the Catholicity which France at such moments finds 
it convenient to parade, the Pope consolidates his 
feeble tyranny. Russia, whose place is beyond the 
pale of European politics proper, forms monstrous 
bonds of alliance, first with one, then with another 
power ; and safe behind the mask of an external 
civilisation, she steals another footstep nearer to the 
Danube or the Dardanelles. The same is true wher- 
ever a weaker oppressor i^ watching for his time 
of spohation. Never does he strike the blow until 
assured that England and France are on too bad 
terms to repress him. Nor is such a season less 
favourable to intrigue than it is to violence. It is 
the signal for a grand campaign of continental cabals. 
In diplomatic wiles Russia, through her thousand 
mouths, whispers the breach still wider. Alliances 
and schemes, extravagantly hollow and ominously 
unnatural, such as are possible only in epochs of 
dead-lock, are born and perish in a day. Corruption 
extends over all alike, and England and France win 
and lose in turn at the gambling hazard of chi- 
cane. Statesmen and parties alike play deeply in 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 59 

the diplomatic game, until all policy is drowned and 
distorted in a situation at once unnatural and im- 
moral. 

In the recent history of Europe nearly every 
disaster which the cause of freedom and progress has 
suffered has been caused during a season of estrange- 
ment, and largely by reason of estrangement, between 
the two great Powers. Attacks upon Turkey by 
Russia demanded as their first condition that Eng- 
land and France should be supposed unable to com- 
bine. The Crimean war would not have been com- 
menced unless Nicholas, in his shortsighted disdain 
for Napoleon, had thought it impossible for English 
statesmen to ally themselves with him. The succes- 
sive partitions of Poland have been effected only 
under a similar conviction. The petty spoliation of 
Denmark was effected only when Napoleon had been 
ostentatiously rebuffed in his overtures towards a 
Pohsh intervention. Austria triumphed over Hun- 
gary and Italy in 1848 in great measure because she 
knew that the English and the French governments 
were quite incapable of cooperation. Had England, 
even by her moral weight, accepted the demands of 
France to aid in freeing Italy from Austria, she might 
with some effect have prevented the tyrannical resto- 
ration of the Pope by French bayonets. Nor would 
Austria have ventured to cross the Ticino in 1859 if 
the close alliance of the Crimean war had continued 
between the heads of the West. The diplomatic 
history of nearly every one of the catastrophes of 
freedom in recent times is a story of persistent and 
wily efforts of the oppressor to divide the policy of 
two great Powers, or to profit by their divisions, and 
of efforts no less persistent by the oppressed to bring 



60 ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 

these powers into concert, or at least into the sem- 
blance of outward agreement. 

By arguments negative and positive, by analogy 
as well as by example, it can be shown that har- 
mony between the two great Powers is essential to 
the wellbeing of Europe. But has this harmony as 
yet any permanent basis ? Have the various causes 
which have contributed to a long peace such solid 
foundation in principle as to render peace a cer- 
tainty? Has not mutual respect and a general con- 
viction of joint interest been at the highest the sole 
ground of union ? Has any thing like active cooper- 
ation been secured excepting from causes at once 
superficial and shifting ? 

The cordiality between the two Governments, 
which from time to time the lackey journals of both 
countries announce with fulsome protestations, is 
generally the result of little more than a party 
manoeuvre, the commonplace of a feeble ministry, 
or the device of an intriguing politician. How often 
within thirty years has the clique which is called 
the Whig party blustered and fawned before the 
government of France ! How often has the recent 
minister of England found it useful to flatter or to 
affront the Emperor Napoleon ! How often has an 
entente cordiale^ heralded by so much cheap eloquence, 
been broken in the very year which saw its rise — to 
be revived next year to serve a parliamentary divi- 
sion ! Cabinet intrigues, demonstrations from cla- 
queurs in the press, compliments and feasts in pa- 
laces, exert no useful influence on the politics of 
two great races, and do nothing to cement a union 
between them. A true union must be made by the 
nations, not by ministries ; it must be based on prin- 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 61 

ciples, not protestations; it must start from a com- 
mon programme of action, in which the entire nation 
can feel pride, and which the entire nation in both 
countries understands. 

Sometimes, instead of being the device of a politi- 
cian, a temporary alliance between the two countries 
has arisen from express or tacit agreement to per- 
mit to each some cherished object of ambition. Such 
occasions must always be of small importance, and 
are hardly possible at all in Europe. But in any 
case such a union is necessarily precarious. Real 
union implies, not a compromise on special matters, 
but a thorough understanding on the general course 
of European politics. If any of the greater ques- 
tions are left out, they will constantly recur to 
trouble the superficial agreement. But a real unity 
of purpose on all the questions at issue will be a 
union too comprehensive to be affected by personal 
intrigues, too moderate and mature to give any thing 
but confidence to their neighbours. 

If it is prudent to inquire on what grounds the 
harmony of England with France is ordinarily placed, 
it is disheartening to learn how slight in reality these 
are. Commercial interest is usually the sole, and 
certainly is the main, bond of union to which states- 
men and writers commonly appeal. Seldom do we 
hear from one school or the other any princijDle of po- 
licy which rises above the sensible but ob^T.ous advice 
that two neighbouring nations, each with so large a 
trade, will probably increase it by remaining on good 
terms. Xothing more is required, we are assured, 
for harmony and prosperity in nations whom nature 
has designed for mutual customers but unlimited 
free trade and general extension of their markets. 



62 ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 

Vaguely and mecliaiiically from the lips of aristo- 
cratic statesmen, dogmatically and passionately from 
those of the popular school, this is proclaimed as the 
sum and substance of European politics. There can 
be no clearer proof of the feebleness of the current 
political doctrines. Commonplaces of this kind can 
stand no serious test, much less can they produce 
any solid progress in opinion. Thus to exaggerate 
the importance of their commercial interests and 
duties is to do dishonour to both countries at once. 
It would not have been heard of except at a time 
when mere economic ideas have supplanted all true 
political principles. Nor is this teaching less futile 
than immoral. France in particular, for reasons — 
some honourable, some dishonourable, to her national 
character — can act, and frequently does act, in open 
disregard of her material interests. Both England 
and France are continually moved by currents of 
feeling, in which all thoughts of the market are 
swept away like straws. In both countries civili- 
sation has a far wider significance than this ; and 
the policy of neither country is invariably in the 
hands of the shopkeepers. Each nation is ready to 
make efforts and sacrifices for very different ends. 
Hence the recent Commercial Treaty has been, in a 
moral and national sense, ridiculously overvalued. It 
is a useful measure, and in spite of the free-trade 
purists, a sensible measure, which does honour to 
the conscientious economist who achieved it and 
the adroit financier who made it popular. On both 
sides of the Channel, besides making several towns 
or classes richer (which is its principal result), it 
has done something towards promoting more friendly 
language, and perhaps more sincere goodwill. But 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 63 

since the policy both of England and France is ulti- 
mately directed by the nation, and not by the class 
which principally benefits by an improvement in 
trade, an alliance which is based on commercial in- 
terest may at any moment be shattered by those 
deeper currents which fill the nation with a strong 
purpose ; in fact, an alliance between two great na- 
tions so situated, which was based entirely on trade, 
would scarcely last many months. Assuredly it 
would not enable the two Powers to do much for 
the peace and prosperity of Europe. 

Such are the grounds on which union with France 
is usually based. It is obvious that none of these 
can render it lasting. That which has now for so 
many years, and through trials so severe, really 
maintained the good harmony between them has 
been the conviction, common to all but a few in both 
countries, that the great ends necessary for the wel- 
fare of France are, in the main, those necessary for 
the welfare of England. Here the dregs of the old 
aristocratic, there of the old military, fanatics nurse 
the malignant hatred of the great war; but in this 
generation, with responsible beings in both countries 
the old religious duty of rivalry and antipathy is as 
completely extinct as the morbid passion of national 
hate which dishonoured the fine nature of Nelson. 
Frenchmen are not reared, like boy Hannibals, to 
dream of a tremendous vengeance; and patrician 
bigots no longer clamour in our senate for the ex- 
tinction of a rival Carthage. But it is obvious that, 
as a fixed ground of national policy, the vague sense 
of common interests between the two countries needs 
to be placed on a basis far more systematic and defi- 
nite. The policy of two nations such as England and 



64 ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 

France, acknowledged as the heads of civilisation in 
Europe, must of necessity embrace great European 
objects, must take some attitude towards the prin- 
cipal movements of the Continent, and satisfy the 
conscience and the honour of two generous races. 
Ends such as these can hardly be effected by com- 
mercial treaties, by free trade, or by large increases 
in consumption. The most confirmed intention of 
buying only in the cheapest and selling only in the 
dearest market is liable to be deranged by very sin- 
gular perturbations. Nothing, in fact, can rise to the 
dignity of a national policy but a broad, wise, and 
comprehensive estimate of the true situation of mo- 
dern Europe. Neither country would be assuming 
its natural position unless it is prepared to face reso- 
lutely the conditions in which it stands, and to as- 
sume responsibilities called forth by each occasion. 
Nor will such a policy be of any permanent use, un- 
less it is thoroughly in harmony with the history and 
traditions of both people ; unless it is felt to be the 
true destiny pointed out by centuries of national life; 
unless it can take hold at once of the higher minds 
of the nation and the instincts and sympathies of the 
mass of the people. 

Any harmony between England and France that 
professes to be based on any thing short of a prin- 
ciple such as this can be nothing but a mockery or 
a phrase. Each nation must have, and will have, its 
national policy more or less systematic, more or less 
comprehensive. And it follows vdth comj^lete cer- 
tainty that, unless the policy of each tends in the 
main towards the same end, they will sooner or later 
result in a conflict. It is the tendency of such a con- 
flict, even where it stops short of overt hostility, to 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 65 

produce a minimum of good and a maximum of evil 
in the influence of each. Xot vague jDrotestations of 
friendship, not common interests in trade, commercial 
treaties, or industrial partnership, can secure us from 
the constant risk of rupture. If harmony between 
England and France is good at all for the countries 
themselves and for their neighbours, the conditions 
of that harmony are not to be mistaken. Each coun- 
try must have a settled and deliberate scheme of 
policy ; the policy of both, in the main, must coincide. 
It must be worked up into systematic concert with 
good faith, forbearance, and patience; and it must 
tend not towards the individual interests of either so 
much as the permanent welfare of the great state 
system which they control. 

The task we have undertaken is to learn whether 
and in what way such a union of policy is practically 
possible. Can any joint action of the two Powers be 
shown to accord -with the history and traditions, with 
the actual position and necessities of each? For this 
view it will be well to devote some space to both in- 
quiries, and to take a survey, first, of the historical 
relations of the two nations throughout the course 
of recent and indeed of modem history; secondly, of 
the actual state system of Europe, and the position 
and functions which they occupy within it. 

As to the necessity for the latter towards any real 
political aim, no doubt will be felt ; but for the most 
part it will be considered as the sole preparation re- 
quisite for judgment. But the need of a careful 
historical estimate, though far less obvious, is much 
more important. It precedes, explains, and strength- 
ens every conclusion drawn from the actual condi- 
tion of affairs. It is the chief cause of the avowed 



QQ ENGLAND AND ERANCE. 

feebleness of so many of the political doctrines and 
leaders of the day, that their objects have never 
been suggested or corrected by true historical ante- 
cedents. If politics are ever to have any systematic 
or consistent form, it is by history alone that they 
can obtain it. ISTor does this in any sense imply that 
separate political acts can be determined by any his- 
torical apparatus. Politics, like all the practical affairs 
of life, must be ultimately ruled by the practical gifts, 
by a happy combination of instinct and experience. 
The day is always a dark one for society when pro- 
fessors or writers snatch the reins of power. But 
historical judgment is yet very necessary to the po- 
litical leader, much more for the political student, in 
a sense very different from that in which statesmen, 
learned in the annals of cabinets, love to cite a pre- 
cedent or borrow a manoeuvre, or journalists, rich in 
the anecdotes of past generations, use them to point 
an illustration or a sarcasm. Statesmen, though it 
is their business to act with the rapid insight which 
alone belongs to native genius, are unworthy of the 
name they assume, unless the broad spirit of their 
conduct strikes the true note which history yields, 
unless they feel that they are directing the present 
down the great track traced out for it by the past. 
The pedantry is in him who refuses, not in him who 
desires, to conform political action to broad courses 
of historical reality. The use of history to the poli- 
tician is not to teach him precedents or to supply him 
with suggestions, but to keep him firm to the broad 
tendencies to stray from which is his ruin. It will 
guide him not to results, but to objects; and when it 
fails to suggest the true course, will effectually warn 
him from the wrong. And if to the politician history 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 67 

is as a compass for his sailing, to the political inquirer 
is it the very logic of his science. 



II. 

Practically speaking, no distinct relations are ob- 
servable between England and France as nations 
until the close of the true period of the Middle Ages. 
The age of the dissolution of the catholic and feudal 
system, that had long given some sort of unity to 
Europe, first shows distinct nationalities and inter- 
national action. The great French wars of our Ed- 
wards and Henrys are at once the symptoms of this 
decline, and the measure of its effect. It is signifi- 
cant that this great period of temporal and moral 
anarchy produced the most wanton and most obsti- 
nate of these international struggles. 1 have no hesi- 
tation in calling this the darkest page in the history 
of both countries. But the terrific sufi^erings which 
the French people endured during that long agony, 
at most but blighted their progress for a time. On 
our national history they rest as a permanent blot. 
When reason and justice have taken the place of a 
barbarous pride in the national traditions, the me- 
mory of our French glories — even the very names of 
Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt — mil come home to 
us as the tale of a wanton and savage folly. They 
are names which reflect no national honour upon 
England (however high be the estimate we set on 
mere personal valour) ; or reflect such honour only 
as the raids of the plunderers of Italy reflect on the 
history of Germany and France. They were wars as 
devoid of legitimate cause as of j)ermanent result. 
They satisfied no political end; achieved no actual 



68 ENGLAND AND FEANCE. 

object; could have led, if successful, to no good; and 
were opposed to tlie rude sense of right even of those 
unsettled times. Whatever good arose out of them 
eventually, was due to the ruin they brought upon 
their authors and promoters. As civil wars only are 
they explicable ; and such historical palliation as they 
possess is to be found in the fact that they were but 
part of the civil convulsion which the failure of the 
catholic and feudal system produced. It is time that 
Englishmen ceased to glory in their share in these 
barbarous national tournaments, and to take a puer- 
ile pride in relating how, in the great orgy of dege- 
nerate chivalry, their countrymen bore off the largest 
share of the worthless and bloody prizes. The wars 
with France are as little worthy of honour as the 
wars of the Roses, and they teach us only the same 
mournful lesson. 

It is only at the close of the long wars which 
marked the ruin of feudalism that true political re- 
lations exist between England and France as parts of 
a European body of states. From that time to the 
present, a period of 400 years, it will be found that 
whenever the policy of the two countries has been 
vigorous and wise, whenever they have both been ful- 
filling their natural functions in that body of states, 
the relations between them have been friendly and 
never directly hostile. On the other hand, whenever 
those relations have been hostile, it has been when 
one or other was pursuing a policy ruinous in itself, 
and which it has ultimately been forced to abandon. 
The wars of England and France mark, in fact, their 
grand crimes and blunders as nations. Their normal 
condition — the condition of their grandest national 
successes — ^is peace; or rather, what is more than 



ENGLAND AND FEANCE. 69 

peace, cooperation. It is a significant fact, and one 
which we too seldom remember, that, mere militar}^ 
glory apart (which can be won in the worst as in the 
best of causes), all that is noblest as political achieve- 
ment throughout the vicissitudes of European com- 
plications for four centuries, the policy of all the true 
statesmen who have left us a heritage of wisdom, has 
been characterised by the maintenance of union with 
France. Our greatest statesmen and their greatest 
statesmen — those whose policy we now can profitably 
recall — all uniformly combined in this. It has been 
repudiated only by those whose policy has been can- 
celled by events. The prejudices which have sprung 
from our ancient and from our recent triumphs in 
war are so strong on us that propositions like these 
are regarded as a paradox. They form, however, 
rules without any true exception. There have been 
times when the policy of England, or when that of 
France, was in desperate defiance of all their duties 
and their traditions. At such moments the weight 
of the other has been thrown into the opposite scale, 
and furious contests have ensued. But their normal 
relations have been those of peace. And no broad 
survey of history can obscure the truth that, from its 
consolidation in the fifteenth century down to the 
latter half of the reign of Louis XIY., the general 
tendency of the French monarchy has been towards 
harmony with the English. 

The patience and address with which the saga- 
cious Louis XL averted the vainglorious invasion of 
Edward lY., the transparent want of purpose that 
invasion betrayed, the anxiety of Louis for peace, the 
ease with which the English king and his council 
allowed themselves to be cajoled, mark the close of 



70 ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 

the long national feud, the substitution of nations for 
fiefs, and statecraft for military adventure. The 
French policy of Henry VIII. is little but a repetition 
of the conduct of Edward. There is the same pre- 
tentious invasion, the conventional war-cry, the same 
willingness to treat, the same mutual respect and 
desire for peace. With the Louises, Ferdinands, and 
Henrys of the fifteenth century these conflicts were 
due rather to inveterate habit than to active ani- 
mosities; and they had too similar and too arduous 
duties at home to make any of them very desirous of 
serious wars. With the sixteenth century — the age 
of Henry VIII., Francis, and Charles V. — the actual 
state system of Europe comes clearly into view. We 
have now the existing national limits, definite inter- 
national relations, and permanent objects of state. It 
may be difficult in the confusion which- precedes the 
first great settlement to trace exactly any intelligible 
policy; but amidst all the kaleidoscopic complications 
of the time there stands out clearly the growing im- 
portance of England in the European system, the 
preponderance which at any moment it can give to 
France, the immense force of both of them united, 
and the real affinity of their true interests and national 
objects. Capricious as was the policy of Francis and 
that of Henry, personal and trivial as were the motives 
which often controlled it, it was in the main the policy 
of natural allies and not of natural enemies. Cui 
adlicereo prceest was the famous motto of Henry, — a 
motto as true now as it was then. It did not mean 
the destruction of France. And when at last, at his 
worst strait, Henry threw his lot in with the captive 
Francis and enabled him to recover his kingdom, he 
instituted a great maxim of policy, — that England 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 71 

has an interest in havino^ her neighbour at once pro- 
gressive and strong, for she has with England the 
joint protectorate of Europe against absolute dominion 
and retrograde oppression. 

With the growth of the power of Charles Y. (whose 
life is justly taken as marking the rise of our modern 
state system) there comes into view clearly the prin- 
ciple which for the three succeeding centuries has 
more or less distinctly formed the clue to European 
history. In spite of serious exceptions and perturba- 
tions, a clear tendency appears that the conservative 
forces, both spiritual and temporal, should gather 
round the House of Austria, and centre in South 
Germany and Spain; that the jorogressive forces are 
jointly or alternately led by England and France ; 
whilst Italy and the whole left bank of the Rhme 
form at once the battle-ground and the prize. During 
the sixteenth century, for the most part, the temporal 
struggle is lost and drowned in the spiritual. Political 
antagonisms and affinities are merged in the religious. 
The death-grapple of the two faiths was nerved by a 
special fanaticism, which overrides all the combina- 
tions of policy, interest, and reason. Yet in the midst 
of these convulsions the same general tendency is at 
work. France in the struggle is torn into two factions ; 
her position is nullified ; and her strength paralysed, 
whilst she is preparing for the middle ground which 
in the religious aspect of the great contest she has 
ever since maintained. England, if not so equally 
divided, sways backwards and forwards with still more 
violent revulsions. In the mean time the House of 
Austria is still the centre of the religious as of the 
political reaction. From time to time some Philip or 
Catherine steals in, like the genius of evil, to lure 



72 ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 

England or France into opposite camps. From time 
to time the very existence of states seems lost in the 
violence of civic disintegration. The deadly struggle 
in which the life of our great sovereign Elizabeth was 
passed might well have blinded a mind less capacious 
and calm to the true affinities of states. But in the 
worst of her straits, in spite of the danger to her per- 
son and her people, in spite of the fanatical hatred 
with which both were assailed by the court party of 
France, neither Elizabeth nor her ministers ever lost 
sight of the truth that England and France in the 
European system are not natural enemies but natural 
allies. Yet this great truth, which civil convulsion 
and religious frenzy for a time had obscured, broke 
forth only into clear light when France had shaken 
off the fever of reaction, and the wise and noble policy 
of Henry lY. had begun to restore her to health and 
vigour. 

The spirit of that great king was well met with 
that of the great queen ; and history can give us no 
finer instance of political sagacity than we see in the 
hearty and confiding alliance of these two consum- 
mate rulers. "She was another self," said Henry; 
"the irreconcilable enemy of my irreconcilable ene- 
mies." Indeed, if we were to search for the type of 
the natural attitude of the governments to each other, 
we could have no better form of it than in the history 
of this period. Mutual confidence and respect, a ge- 
nerous spirit of cooperation, a consciousness of a com- 
mon duty, but a spirit always tempered by watch- 
fulness and caution, was the spirit in which they 
assumed their protectorship of Europe. This is not 
the place to analyse or weigh the famous Political 
Design of Henry, the scheme for the pacification and 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 73 

settlement of Europe. Nothing would be more mis- 
taken than to regard it as the chimera of one vision- 
ary brain. The scheme was thoroughly reduced to 
practical working. It had gradually won its way 
into the cautious mind of the veteran Sully. It re- 
ceived the actual adhesion of a large proportion of 
the European powers, and nothing but the dagger of 
Ravaillac prevented its immediate execution. But 
the scheme, as we read it in Sully, was as thoroughly 
that of Elizabeth as it was that of Henry. She had 
been the earliest and the staunchest maintainer of 
the central purpose of the design. It was impossible 
without the active cooperation of England ; and on 
the death of Elizabeth, Henry regarded it as almost 
annihilated. This is not the place to decide upon its 
wisdom or its practicability. It may be that, as a 
reconstructive system, it was impossible or prema- 
ture ; but the idea on which it rested is an idea as 
definite as it is true. That idea is the reality of the 
system of states in Europe, the necessity for their 
harmony and cooperation, the leading part which her 
history and position give to France in the common 
councils of Europe, the need of an intimate alliance 
with England, and the conviction, that with both 
combined, the cause of good government, progress, 
and peace resides. The conception of the greatest 
of the French kings long ruled the policy of French 
statesmen. This grand, if premature, idea was main- 
tained by a series of ministers, wise, or respectable at 
least, down to the time when the tumid ambition of 
Louis XIY. ruined his country and blotted out his 
dynasty. Xeither that deplorable catastrophe nor 
the delirium of the revolutionary wars have suc- 
ceeded in destroying it ; and it remains now, what it 



74 ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 

was two centuries and a half ago, the deep conviction 
of thoughtful minds on both sides of the Channel, and 
the true key of European politics. 

For a moment the fanatical party which struck 
down the great Henry in the full maturity of his 
wisdom succeeded in perverting from its path the 
public action of his beloved country. Their tenure 
of power was long enough to complete that ill-starred 
marriage with the House of Austria — that adulterous 
mingling, it has been said, of the blood of Henry 
and of Philip. But the genius of France, as though 
aroused by this outrage, lived again in the spirit of 
the great successor of Henry ; he who, with yet 
greater difficulties, carried on the same work with 
yet greater power — the most consummate of modern 
statesmen — the profound and majestic Eichelieu. For 
twenty-six years the policy of France was directed 
on one unbending but sagacious system, which almost 
created France as a nation, if it did not create its 
national character, and which certainly for a century 
and a half stamped its impress on the history of Eu- 
rope. The first act of Richelieu as minister was to an- 
nounce the return to the policy of the late king, and to 
attempt to reopen the English alliance by the marri- 
age with Charles. At the close of his unbroken career 
the ground was already prepared for the settlement 
which resulted in the peace of Westphalia; the settle- 
ment which for two centuries has been, and still in 
some sense is, the basis of the state system of modern 
Europe ; the settlement which half realised the de- 
sign of Henry, which his design might possibly have 
accomplished without the thirty years of carnage. 
The policy of Eichelieu is far too strongly marked 
and too well understood to need any commentary 



ENGLAND AND TRANCE. 75 

here. It is a policy so systematic in principle and so 
rich in its actual fruits that it may be taken as the 
t}^ical and historical policy of France. As such we 
can judge it. The policy of France was again in the 
hands of a great man, and again it was a policy in sub- 
stance the same. The policy of England is no longer 
in the hands of a great ruler, but becomes utterly 
incoherent and contemptible under the intriguing 
bigotry of the race of Stuart. But the policy of 
France is not altered ; France again assumes the lead- 
ership of the progressive movement in Europe, and 
again, as a first condition, sohcits the active coopera- 
tion of England. The help meet for hhn, which in a 
later generation he might have found in the political 
genius of Cromwell, Richelieu was forced to eke out 
by the mere military genius of Gustavus. The in- 
fluence of England under the Stuarts was nothing ex- 
cept when it was evil. But in spite of the sore trials 
to his principles, in spite of the vacillations, bigotry, 
and falseness of the wretched Stuart courts, in spite 
even of the demagogic support of La Rochelle, Riche- 
lieu was never betrayed into a hostile attitude to 
England, never even overlooked the inherent strength 
of her position. The English prisoners at Rhe were 
sent home honourably; no reasonable opportunity of 
peace was neglected; and the whole system of the 
most systematic of modern statesmen supposes cor- 
diahty and union with England. That system was 
only not carried out with the full cooperation of 
England because for the time, in her own internal 
convulsions, England was withdrawn from action 
abroad. But it was carried out, if not with England 
herself, with the natural allies of England, — by the 
same means, to the same end, and with the same 



76 ENGLAND AND FKANCE. 

spirit with which, both before and afterwards, the 
name of England was identified. In the hands of 
Eichelieu the policy of France was modified and de- 
veloped from that of Henry, but it was essentially 
the same. To concentrate and complete the great- 
ness of the country without yielding to the lust of 
covetous aggression; to conciliate and balance the 
rival fanaticisms in religion without giving victory to 
either ; to rest the frontiers of states on geographical 
and national bases ; to establish liberty of conscience 
without political anarchy; to humble the reactionary 
dynasties without unlimited revolution; to determine 
the final ascendency of the progressive over the re- 
trograde system; and to make France the heart of 
this action by giving her a moral rather than a ma- 
terial empire — such, in brief, was the work of the 
great dictator. 

The policy of Eichelieu was one so solidly based 
that it suffered scarcely any interruption by his death ; 
and again, for eighteen years, his system was con- 
tinued by his servant and pupil Mazarin. The irre- 
gular conditions and the inferior capacity of this min- 
istry rob that system, if not of its success, at least 
of its dignity and distinctness. The characteristic 
intrigue, the shifting combinations, and the personal 
meanness which disfigure the statecraft of Mazarin, 
are but too often repeated by the anecdote-mongers 
of history as the substance, and not as the adjunct of 
his policy. Viewed by a broader light, it was but 
the legitimate continuation of the policy of Eichelieu, 
as that was the legitimate continuation of the policy 
of Henry. The weapons of the bygone chiefs tremble 
in the feebler hands of their successors. But they 
are yet sufiicient for their work. How right and 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 77 

systematic the task was, the closing triumph of the 
life of Mazariii — the treaty of the Pyrenees — draws 
in most striking lines. When we see the ruler of 
France — and he an Italian, a churchman, and a car- 
dinal — the virtual author of the most concentrated 
of autocracies, allying himself with the English Re- 
public, mth the acknowledged head of Protestantism, 
and jointly with him labourmg towards a common 
object, securing the degradation of the great Spanish 
despotism and the definite ascendency of France, we 
recognise the grand current of affairs shaping itself 
to its determined course across all the minor obstacles 
of individual Avills and disturbing accidents. Internal 
difficulties and the complication of interests for a 
time separated the chief imitator from the great rival 
of Richelieu ; but as soon as they thoroughly under- 
stood each other, so soon as the relations of states 
grew definite, the policy of Mazarin and of Cromwell 
was convergent and not antagonistic. Both were in 
the deepest sense traditional, both were intensely na- 
tional, and both essentially systematic. And it is of 
high historical significance that in orbits so different 
we find their common progression so similar. 

But Mazarin, with all his claims as a politician, 
can as little compare with Cromwell in true sagacity 
as he can in greatness of purpose. The greatest of 
the Protestant chiefs was also among the foremost of 
modern statesmen. Those who look with immode- 
rate pride on our distant dominions, and with im- 
moderate fear on their ultimate abandonment, are the 
men who mistrust the true greatness and strength 
of Britain and its inhabitants. Such may learn a 
useful lesson by turning to the position which Eng- 
land held in Europe under Cromwell — England, 



78 ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 

witliout Indian, American, or Australian empires; 
without Gibraltar, witliout Malta, without Hong 
Kong, and mthout one of those thousand posts 
where the British flag now studs the Pacific and 
the Asiatic Oceans. 

A few years of a great man's rule raised her from 
utter insignificance and abasement, to be in material 
strength among the first, in moral purpose the first 
of the nations of Europe, the leader of free civilisa- 
tion and the destinies of the West, the hope and help 
of the oppressed, the curb of the tyrant. Trammelled 
as he was by his narrow creed, and fired by the na- 
tional lust for maritime aggrandisement, the policy 
of the great Protector abroad tended at times to fa- 
naticism, at times to injustice; but into one error, 
however imminent, he never fell. He never mistook 
the truth that the Catholicism of France was, in its 
way, no less progressive than the Protestantism of 
England ; that the true ends of both countries could 
not be served by opposition ; that their cordial union 
was essential to the security and welfare of Europe. 
As Richelieu had continued the policy of Henry in 
France, Cromwell recalled to life the policy of Eliza- 
beth in England ; and the lives of the two wisest of 
the modern rulers of England, and the two wisest 
who, in modern times, have ruled France, thus fall in 
their main notes into perfect harmony and natural 
sequence. 

We come now to the disastrous epoch when all 
union was destroyed by the fatal influences which 
had long been gathering within and around the 
doomed monarchy of France. 

The latter portion of the reign of Louis XIV., as 
the pacific influence of the great Colbert declines, 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 79 

brings us to this disastrous change. It is no less than 
the contradiction of the policy which the great men 
of France had upheld for a century, and the annihila- 
tion of her well-earned place and influence. The later 
years of the Grand Monarque form just that period 
of her history in which France is the farthest from 
the true political leadership of Europe, at the lowest 
point of her national greatness. Spurred on by his 
o^vn mean arrogance and by intriguing bigots, the 
king, whose duty it was, and whose pride it had once 
been, to follow the steps of Henry lY. and Sully, of 
Richelieu, Mazarin, and Colbert, passed over with his 
whole force to the enemy ; called round himself the 
retrograde powers which it had been the glory of his 
throne to have curbed, and used the influence which, 
to protect Europe from oppression, had been con- 
ceded to France, in the very work of making France 
the oppressor of Europe. 

South Germany practically passed over to the side 
of freedom, and France inherited and extended the 
sinister traditions of Spain. Dazzled by the power 
which his predecessors had won in the cause of pro- 
gress, he turned its forces to the cause of repression. 
For Europe nothing was left but signal retribution on 
the apostate dynasty; and the heroic resolution of 
the great Dutch chief, in whom lived again the an- 
tagonist of Phihp, and the daring genius of Marl- 
borough, gave us the few amongst our triumphs over 
France to which Englishmen can look back with un- 
mixed pride. 

The true headship of Europe, moral and intel- 
lectual, which the character and genius of Elizabeth 
and of Cromwell for a season had twice before given 
her, passed over for a season distinctly to England. 



80 ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 

During the whole of the century preceding the Re- 
volution, the movement of Europe is speculative, 
religious, industrial, and social, rather than political. 
Political action is feeble and confused, and but one 
great character occupies the field. Yet whilst it is 
plain that England bore a large, at times the largest, 
share in the scientific and industrial movement, in 
the political sphere she no less manifestly possessed 
the casting vote, the reserve force, the ultimate ap- 
peal of Europe. 

During the period of ignoble intrigue which inter- 
venes between the peace of Utrecht and the French 
revolution, it would be useless to look for any high, 
or indeed any settled, political purpose. In the col- 
lapse of all political aims and convictions, the relations 
of states are reduced to a mere struggle for material 
advantages, on the side of England to a blind and pro- 
fligate struggle for maritime ascendency and colonial 
empire. This much, however, is clear. The criminal 
extravagance of Louis XIY. once bitterly avenged, 
France tends feebly to recover her natural ground; 
and the English and the French statesmen, or rather 
the feeble diplomatists of the day, again tend towards 
a real alliance, watchful and broken as it was. Wal- 
pole indeed — a statesman whose sagacious zeal for 
the general welfare of England outweighs the corrupt 
means with which he bent a corrupt aristocracy into 
reason — succeeded during the long years in which he 
governed England in maintaining unbroken a cordial 
alliance with France. When the jealousy of a worth- 
less cabal forced him to surrender, first his principles 
and shortly afterwards his power, it was Spain, ndt 
France, which was the object of the national antipathy, 
or rather of the national cupidity. 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 81 

The triple alliance, the quadruple alliance, both 
equally point to the fact that, though the old European 
parties are almost extinguished, the tradition of Eng- 
land and France as allies against the reactionary 
powers was not wholly forgotten. It is even some 
compensation to France for the humiliation of en- 
during such rulers as the Regent Dubois and Fleury, 
that they had the good sense to cling fast to this prin- 
ciple ; so that their ignoble scheming was far less 
injurious to their country than that of the ambitious 
bigots who succeeded them. Unhappily the direction 
of France passed into the hands of men who, to cor- 
ruption hardly less than theirs and far inferior vigour, 
added the retrograde ambition of Louis XIY. France 
again, under the guidance of incorrigible fanatics or 
the creatures of royal debauchery, is seen to pass to 
the side of the oft-stricken House of Austria and the 
Bourbons of Spain. Aghast at the sight of the new 
Prussia, which by a happy return to her traditionary 
policy she had assisted to found, the blind successors 
of Richelieu joined in the ill-starred coalition to crush 
the only modern king who was worthy to be his peer, 

England, in the main, corrects the balance which 
the wretched incapacity of French policy is continu- 
ally unsettling. In the main her action in Europe, 
always more pacific than those of the other states, 
though for causes which do her small honour, tends 
in Europe to the side of order, freedom, and national 
independence. Beyond the limits of the Western 
system, it is true, her policy is one long and dark 
story of colonial aggression and commercial rapacity. 
But within it she maintains the part which, with the 
superior advantage of her position, France had in the 
previous century more systematically supported. She 

G 



82 ENGLAND AND TEANCE. 

resists the reactionary ambition of Spain ; she steadily 
opposes all further extension of the House of Austria ; 
she cultivates the alliance, where it is possible, of 
France ; she is favourable to, but watchful of, the rise 
of Prussia ; she interferes to prevent the premature 
and selfish dismemberment of Austria herself; she 
turns again to prevent the tyrannical attempt at the 
dismemberment of Prussia. In every treaty and 
almost every alliance her might is felt; in the main 
it is exerted in the interests of European progress, 
her deeper energies and thoughts being concentrated 
upon the task of founding her colonial empire. 

It is a policy which, had it been followed con- 
sistently by free statesmen and not by successions of 
parliamentary partisans, might have been accounted 
almost wise ; and had it been less deeply vitiated by 
the lust of mercantile aggrandisement, might almost 
have been remembered as honourable. Illumined 
now by the sterling sense of Walpole, now by the 
grand but overweening character of Chatham, now 
by the heroism of Eodney and Wolfe, — with all its 
vices and its virtues, it was the policy of an aristo- 
cracy which, whilst offering to the middle classes as 
the price of rule the plunder of the seas and of the 
East, was not wholly incapable of directing the action 
of a free and progressive people. Unstable and per- 
sonal as that policy was, and at times frightfully un- 
scrupulous, it was frequently betrayed into hostility 
with France ; but no reasonable student of history 
can judge it when taken in the main as any thing but 
the feeble reproduction of the policy of our greater 
statesmen, — the policy of upholding the course of 
liberty and national independence in Europe against 
the retrograde powers and against attempts at violent 



ENGLAND AND PEANCE. 83 

aggression. Assuredly no candid mind can judge it 
(again when looked at broadly as a whole) as a policy 
of settled antagonism to France, as based on any deep 
difference of principle or any inveterate antipathy of 
race. 

Such was the state of things at the moment of 
the great crisis,- — the long-gathering revolution of 
Europe. The whole fabric of the degenerate mon- 
archy of France, with the spiritual and temporal forces 
which had gathered round it, were overturned ; and 
the wrongs which the Louises and their courtiers 
had done to France, to peace, to freedom, and to rea- 
son were fiercely avenged. The violence of the crisis 
was extreme; but it was clear then, and it grows 
ever clearer to us now, that amidst it France was 
working out the legitimate issue of her whole past 
and entering on the system of the future. Again, 
and now in a far more emphatic manner, the genius 
of French civilisation carried her to the head of the 
European movement ; and this time it was a headship 
at once political, social, and intellectual. She had to 
call into life and to sustain the principle of rule in 
accordance with national necessities, which has re- 
modelled, and is still remodelling, the state system of 
Europe ; she had the yet more difficult and the longer 
task of reconstructing society on the basis of organised 
labour; she had the leading part in the most arduous 
task of all, that which both precedes and must sys- 
temise the rest, — the task of reducing into practice 
the new philosophy of society, which the progress 
of European thought had evolved ; she had under- 
taken to lead the way towards the regeneration of the 
political doctrines, of the national unity, of the social 
system, — the law, the administration, the industry, 



84 ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 

and the religion of Europe. The effort was made 
most imperfectly and most stormily, with the aid of 
the leading minds and characters of Europe consci- 
ously cooperating for a century, in spite of organised 
opposition without and chaotic confusion within ; and 
Europe still owes to her a debt of gratitude for the 
sacrifices and agonies she endured in the spasms of 
this momentous birth. 

The true nature of this great movement, and the 
part which England might have played in it, was 
seen by the greater spirits, and by the national in- 
stinct in this country and elsewhere, and felt even by 
the abler section of our governing aristocracy. Un- 
fortunately for England and for the world, the voice 
of Fox and Macintosh was drowned by the selfish ter- 
rors of the dominant majority, and the whole force 
of England was thrown into the reactionary scale. 
The tragic pathos of Burke and the lofty resolution 
of Pitt, in doing battle for the ancient order, almost 
blind us yet to the fatal badness of their cause. 
Many a doomed system has given a sort of melan- 
choly grandeur to its last defenders. But neither 
the character or the genius of Cicero, of Sixtus, of 
Parma, or of Strafford can make us forget that their 
success would have arrested the progress of mankind. 
After the mean and hesitating policy of preceding 
statesmen, there is something of at least grand fana- 
ticism in the furious attack of England on revolu- 
tionary France, and unquestionably much that is 
heroic in the latter period, when the war had become 
one of liberty and of defence. The English aristo- 
cracy committed the blunder and the crime which 
had ruined the monarchy of France, with even less 
ground of excuse and (to Europe) far more disas- 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 85 

trous result. At the close of the seventeenth cen- 
tury the ambition of Louis XIY. had attempted to 
use the position which the history of his country had 
given him in the work of destroying that position and 
undoing that history. At the close of the eighteenth 
the panic of the governing class of England turned 
the force which, in the name of industry, progress, 
peace, and freedom, they were permitted to direct, to 
the task of crushing out a new phase of all of these 
at once. Doubtless it was a revolution, and a por- 
tentous one — one destined to modify their whole 
position and power — which they were called upon to 
welcome. But they were themselves the product of 
a successful revolution, and were forced by every 
principle they asserted to carry it to its natural con- 
clusion. Deliberately, at the most critical moment 
of modern history, they chose the wrong cause ; and 
again, of the two nations the leaders of civilisation, 
one passed over with its whole force to the side of 
the enemy. That the official course of English policy 
was on the wrong side, has been demonstrated by 
events. Temporarily, outwardly, its resistance was 
successful. It succeeded in reestablishing the an- 
cient monarchy; it succeeded in crushing and almost 
m proscribing the new spirit. In the blind settle- 
ment known as the Treaties of Vienna they thought 
to establish the old order permanently. Every act 
of that settlement has been undone and is undoing 
before our eyes. The successors of the English re- 
actionaries are now leagued with the successors of 
the revolutionary chief to carry out the principles 
which that revolution inaugurated. It is in vain 
now to point to the fatal and frightful extravagances 
which accompanied the actual crisis. The revolu- 



86 ENGLAND AND FEANCE. 

tion was carried out under conditions so adverse and 
special that no judgment can be passed as to how 
far these extravagances were inherent in it or were 
induced by circumstances. The French nation were 
forced to carry out the greatest and most arduous 
of all social changes under foreign aggression more 
formidable than any modern people has endured. 
France, in a word, was martyred by and for her 
sister nations. 

To the careful student of the Revolution, the 
spasms of the Eeign of Terror keep cadence, beat 
for beat, with the tramp of the foreign invaders. 
The culminating agony of the struggle within coin- 
cides almost to a few days with the height of the 
danger from without. As Europe advances in arms, 
the murders in the prisons begin; as the coalition 
thunders forth its threats, the delirium is at its 
height; as the defeated invaders retreat, the guillo- 
tiue descends. 

It is in vain also now to pretend that the Coalition 
itself was a work of defence. It is a pretext too shal- 
low to be now repeated that France in the hour of 
her extreme prostration, — utterly disorganised, with- 
out an army or a navy, government or supplies; 
without credit, money, or resources, — was becoming 
a danger to Europe, was meditating general aggres- 
sion or dominion. The trope of her great leader, 
Danton, is as true as it is wild. France only took up 
the gage of battle that was hurled at her, and flung 
down before Europe the head of a king. But the 
attack on France was no more one of legitimate de- 
fence than the attack of the northern autocrats on 
Poland was defensive. In both cases it was a con- 
spiracy at once to crush out a freedom which they 



ENGLAND AND FEANCE. 87 

dreaded, and to divide the spoil which they coveted. 
Never had people been so cruelly and wantonly bested. 
Having in pursuit of a dominant idea disarmed her- 
self and reduced herself almost to helplessness, with 
scarcely a trained soldier under her standards or a 
general of division who could be trusted, France found 
herself the object of attack from a coalition of almost 
every state in Europe, with four or five armies of as 
many powers upon her soil, her officials corrupted, 
her provinces stirred into revolt, her ports blockaded, 
her commerce destroyed, her fortresses razed, her soil 
honeycombed with foreign conspiracies, her name, her 
national character, government, institutions, and prin- 
ciples held up to violent invective from every corner 
of Europe, half a mdlion of men in arms with the 
avowed object of annihilating her as a nation, and 
fomenting with rancorous energy every form of civic 
confusion, discord, and treachery. And this was done 
in the name of a cause which the right hand of that 
Coalition has utterly discarded. Of late years, in the 
eyes of certain schools, England has been even more 
identified with the leading principles of this great 
change than France herself. Mistaken as this is, it 
serves to show how completely England has aban- 
doned the Coalition. With or mthout the aid of 
England, as a fact the spirit of the Revolution, in a 
moral sense, has triumphed. The principle that the 
permanent good of the entire people is paramount; 
that nations have no solid basis except as they repre- 
sent the wants and desires of an aggregate race ; that 
all rule is tyrannical which is alien to the popular 
will; that national greatness is based on industrial 
and not on military activity; that public life must 
come to embrace all members of the nation, educated, 



88 ENGLAND AND FEANCE. 

trained, and organised for this end; that by steady 
but incessant steps the whole of our modern institu- 
tions, European, national, and social, must be remo- 
delled upon the new basis, — such are the principles 
which are now the very maxims of all who believe 
at once in progress and in order, whether in France 
or England, in any part of civilised Europe ; and 
these are at bottom the principles of the Kevolution. 
Until these principles are frankly accepted by those 
who rule this country, and until they still further 
acknowledge that with France lies their initiation and 
their earliest and fullest development, the action of 
England in Europe must remain vacillating, inex- 
plicable, and neutral. This spirit has already deeply 
penetrated the brain and the conscience of this coun- 
try; but its cordial adoption by any political party 
will at once make that party the natural directors of 
its policy. The traditional Whig statesmen have just 
courage enough to repudiate the language of the Co- 
alition, but not enough to welcome the vital strength 
of the Kevolution. All who refuse this are disquaH- 
fied at once for any useful foreign policy. But the 
moment that those who rule here have determined to 
adopt it, the relations of England and France at once 
become consistent, intelligible, and cordial. Their 
historical attitude is resumed ; they again pursue 
their common work with the same spirit, but in differ- 
ent modes — the common work with which the greater 
rulers of each country are closely identified ; the 
work which for three centuries they have carried on 
without serious interruption, except on the two occa- 
sions when the arrogance of Louis and the fanaticism 
of Pitt drove their respective people headlong on the 
path of evil. 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 89 

Since the peace the history of the relations of 
England with France is the history of the renuncia- 
tion of all the principles with which the Coalition 
entered into war. In a moral sense, and to the po- 
litical student, France has redressed her material de- 
feat by the triumph of her social ideas. Waterloo has 
been thrice avenged by the victors combining with 
the vanquished to enforce the principles of which 
that battle-field was once thought to be the grave. 
Every one of the great acts of the drama of Euro- 
pean history has been a fresh gain to the cause of 
the Revolution, to that of nationality, republicanism, 
social and international fraternity; public ophiion, 
justice, and moral right. Since the days of Canning, 
whether directed by Whig or Tory politicians, it has 
been a question only whether the policy of England 
should welcome these principles with greater or less 
frankness. 

So soon as the military ambition of imperialism 
was crushed and the bitterness which its suppression 
produced was extinct, the poHcy of England and 
France reverted to its ancient convergence of pur- 
pose, and both resumed something of their natural 
functions. The negotiations respecting Poland in 1 8 3 1, 
abortive as they were, and feeble as they exhibit 
the statesmen of England to have been, bring before 
us France again in her former position as the promo- 
ter of the cause of freedom and nationality in Europe, 
but as hoping to succeed in it only through the co- 
operation of England. On each occasion on which 
the undying Polish struggle has been felt — in 1846, 
in 1848, in 1855, and 1864 — the same thing has been 
seen, and on each occasion with increasing distinct- 
ness. Putting aside the miserable squabbles arising 



90 ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 

out of extra - European embroilments and dynastic 
intrigues, on the greater questions of European poli- 
tics, the policy of England and France has tended to 
agreement in the interests of order and progress. 

That it has resulted in so little was due largely 
to the peculiar timidity and feebleness of the poli- 
ticians Avho directed the foreign policy of the two 
countries. During the convulsion of 1848 the same 
causes were perpetually at work, but were frustrated 
of any practical result by the same personal indecision 
and incoherence of aim. The accession of a really 
strong hand to the policy of France, coinciding mth 
something like a strong and popular administration 
in England, has for the first time enabled these prin- 
ciples to bear fruits of any worth. The Crimean war 
— begun by France mainly for dynastic and military, 
by England for commercial and Asiatic, ends — slowly 
became, under the forming principle of public opi- 
nion, and by sheer force of the natural truth of the re- 
lation, a really European movement, of which France 
and England were at once the heads and the arms. 
Unsatisfactory as much of this history is, it was at 
bottom the combination of the West for European 
objects under its natural leaders. To the perplexity 
of some of the politicians engaged, the closing phase 
of this war, in the Conference of Paris, rose to a 
moral dignity and providence which for the first time 
realised in outline the future congresses and settle- 
ments of the West. The regeneration of Italy, the 
natural sequence of the Conference of Paris — and 
which forms with it the bright side of the second 
empire — is but a continuation of the same policy. 
In spite of jealousies and caprices, the restoration of 
Italy has been the work of England and of France 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 91 

together; a work to which Xapoleon has given the 
initiative, but the issue of which is in the hands of 
the entire English and the entire French nation. In 
the recent Polish and Danish wars, in nearly every 
European question wliich arises, the same principles 
are apparent. Now, as so often before, the nations 
seem to force this part spontaneously on the two 
heads of the Western system. That it hitherto has 
had results so small is due to the extreme difficulty 
of the situation and to the personal unfitness of the 
politicians. To JN'apoleon III. it must be conceded 
that he recognises this principle more steadily than 
any statesman in England or in France. His rule, 
for the first time in recent history, has brought it to 
efficient results, and each year of it has strengthened 
and illustrated the principle. His strong and fixed 
desire for a European congress is but one form of it; 
a desire which must be one day realised. In the mean 
time each year teems with proofs that the set of all 
public opinion in Europe and of general events is to- 
wards an active combination between England and 
France to realise without convulsion the necessary 
chanofes in its condition. 



III. 

After tracino^ the course of Eno^lish traditions and 
statesmen in the past, we may turn to the actual 
position of England in the state system of Europe. 
If the study of the past guides us to understand the 
true ends of a right national policy, that of the pre- 
sent alone can supply us with materials for attaining 
those ends. 

Here occurs a difficulty which is often fatal to 



92 ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 

inquiries of the kind. A petty and antiquated notion 
of patriotism is still so rooted in the popular mind as 
to make serious reasoning on the subject difficult. It 
is still not felt to be discreditable to bluster about 
national merits and qualities, in which men but half 
believe and which they quite refuse to discuss. Men 
who are incapable of the coarser forms of bravado in 
which journalists indulge, calmly assume as an un- 
questionable premiss the inherent superiority of their 
country. This same spirit in individuals is justly 
stigmatised as an odious failing : in national morality 
it passes for half a virtue. Devotion to national 
interests is just as capable of taking a brutalising 
form as devotion to our personal interests, if not 
ruled by wider motives. And patriotism, which as 
contrasted with personal selfishness is a good, as 
contrasted with love of the human race is an evil. 
Unless subordinated to a nobler duty, it is a mere 
collective selfishness, capable of every meanness and 
cruelty that private selfishness begets. In days when 
in international affairs religion does little but fan 
antipathies, and morality is so often invoked to justify 
them, we hardly hear of patriotism, except when some 
class or set of men have on hand some special scheme 
of rapacity and violence. Of all the noble qualities 
which this feeling under favourable conditions and in 
due guidance might inspire, we hardly ever hear. Of 
true pride in the national honour, of personal sacrifice 
for the public welfare, of zeal for collective duties, of 
faith in the grander traditions of our history, we hear 
little under the guise of patriotism. Sound political 
truths can make no way until this stupid form of 
conceit is judged in nations as it is judged in men. 
Eight public action, true public spirit, and national 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 93 

self-respect, are utterly impossible in a people who 
have not sufficient manliness to understand their own 
real rank, their weaknesses, their strength, and their 
duties. To mystify all political problems by an un- 
reasoning and arrogant egoism is humiliating and 
enfeebling to a nation, inexcusable in their rulers, 
and criminal in their teachers. The only patriotism 
worthy of intellio-ent citizens is the resolution to act 
up to their national duties and to carry out the true 
ends of the national genius. Men who feel themselves 
ready to make personal sacrifices for their country's 
true honour and high name must disregard the spite- 
ful charge of want of patriotism from literary or 
political demagogues. Solid and reasonable principles 
of public policy and national duty can be framed only 
in a spirit of judicial and scientific inquiry, and in 
the consciousness of an afi^ection for fatherland which 
means something else than cupidity disguised by 
bluster. Let us proceed, therefore, to weigh the place 
of England amongst the states of Europe and her 
relations Avith them, without caring to conciliate the 
grosser forms of national arrogance and conceit. 

The first great fact which strikes us in the actual 
state of Europe is the fact that the Western states, 
when viewed in their relation to the rest of the world, 
form a loose but real species of confederacy. Since 
the close of the great revolutionary convulsion it has 
been srrowino; more and more obvious that there is 
amongst the members of the European state system an 
increasing sense of natural connection and of common 
duties towards the general cause of civilisation. The 
association of states, in the main identical with the 
limits of the Western Roman empire, in the main 
coinciding with the ground covered by feudalism and 



94 ENGLAND AND FEANCE. 

by Catholicism, the same which took part in the great 
religious struggles of the sixteenth century and in 
the great commercial and territorial wars of the 
eighteenth century, has been gradually assuming a 
shape more real, more conscious, and more perma- 
nent. Its mission as leading the van of civilisation is 
no less apparent. In the legislation and treaties with 
respect to the slave-trade, in the various European 
councils and congresses, in the growing tendency to 
aj)peal to European councils for settlements, in the 
constant resort to international conferences on sub- 
ordinate points, and in the multiplicity of purely 
civil, industrial, commercial, and sanitary treaties, we 
can trace the progress of the West towards a practical 
confederation. In the waters of Japan, partially so 
in China, we see this sentiment carried mto joint 
action in spite of national and traditional rivalries. 
Towards the Turkish and the Moorish races we can 
still see the same spirit at work, disturbed by yet 
keener and more complicated jealousies. To America 
we see Europe occasionally assume the attitude of a 
corporate whole. America indeed is in justice as 
truly a part of this confederation in all that affects 
its dealings with the yellow, red, and dark races, as 
England herself; but her geographical separation 
and her peculiar history practically remove her from 
purely contmental questions and mere European in- 
terests. Lastly, although a long course of reactionary 
blunders in the statesmen of Western Europe had for 
a time confounded the Muscovite power in this asso- 
ciation of states — the events of the last decade — the 
results of the Crimean war— her internal social con- 
vulsions — the Polish struggle — and the profound 
horror and estrangement of the civilised world which 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 95 

it caused, have proved that the vanguard of the human 
family and the destinies of the race are found as yet 
in the Western section of Europe alone. 

In this association of nations it requires little 
reasoning to show that England and France hold a 
preponderating place. By their material force, by 
their industrial greatness, by their national cohesion 
and energy, no less than by their traditions and their 
prestige, they are marked out as the tmn chiefs of 
the European system. Great promise in the future 
is found in other nations and races. As great and 
even greater elements of moral or intellectual emi- 
nence belong to other people ; but no reasonable 
mind can doubt that, for all the practical ends of 
actual politics, England and France have a distinct 
preeminence in Europe. In that union of innate 
strength, material resources, moral prestige, historical 
renown, and popular enlightenment which political 
leadership in these days implies, no other state at 
present can distantly compare with these two. 

On every ground Eussia can make no fair claim 
to such a place. As a power semi- oriental and semi- 
civilised she is clearly outside the pale of our modern 
political life. A nation still struggling in the throes 
of serfdom, and to the very existence of which a 
military autocracy seems essential, can interfere in 
the movement of our political activity to nothing but 
a sinister end. The heterogeneous soldiery of Prussia 
and Austria can mislead no one as to their real 
weakness as political forces. Besides these, no other 
Power in Europe can pretend to the material and 
moral weio^ht which a leadino^ Power must combine. 
On the other hand, the influence exercised both by 
England and by France in their respective spheres is 



96 ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 

very real and definite. The European state system 
itself is shaken by several conflicting principles, which 
complicate the relations of its members and often 
neutralise the action of the whole. Catholicism and 
Protestantism, with much diminished vigour, still 
control and agitate it on periodical occasions. The 
great religious struggle is being gradually lost in 
the new struggle of established Christianity against 
philosophy and science. But the antagonism of the 
Catholic and the Protestant interests, which in the 
minor questions of European politics — in the deve- 
lopment of Belgium, Scandinavia, Switzerland, and 
Spain — is constantly but irregularly at work, rises 
occasionally, as in the Polish contest, into a feature 
of extreme importance. It assumes even deeper 
significance in the whole Italian question and that of 
Papal independence, — a question which underlies and 
will outlast any temporary solution of the military 
occupation of Eome. 

An antagonism somewhat similar in its extent, 
somewhat deeper in its effects, though far less de- 
fined, is that division of race into the great classes 
of the Latin and the Teutonic. But easily as the 
feeling of race disappears or is neutralised under 
strong pressure, its subtle and persistent influence, so 
closely connected with every element of civilisation, 
produces a real antagonism, or rather coordination, 
amongst the Powers of Europe. No practical states- 
man can afford to underestimate its force, for it 
expresses real and profound varieties of national cha- 
racter. And it would be an idle dream to suppose 
that a Latin and a Teutonic people will for ages 
exhibit the same affinity as that which exists between 
two peoples of the same origin. Connected with the 



ENGLAND AXD FRANCE. 97 

religious and ethnological, and nearly identical in 
area, is another dualism — that between the peoples 
who have modified and retained the feudal organi- 
sation of society and those who have transformed it 
into a new social system; where the hierarchy of 
birth and property is in full ascendency, as in Ger- 
many, or under legal and constitutional restrictions, 
as in England ; and where it has given place totally, 
as in France, partially, as in Spain and Italy, to social 
equality and military autocracy. 

Akin to this is the contrast between the prin- 
ciples of hereditary and of republican government, 
between nations with whom the aristocratic and 
monarchic system is in full vitality, as in Germany 
and England, and those with whom, as in France, 
the popular will reigns supreme, more or less identi- 
fied with an individual dictator. There is, again, the 
struo:o:le between industrialism and militarism; be- 
tween a localised and a centralised form of adminis- 
tration; between parliamentary and bureaucratic in- 
stitutions. All of these are principles which combine 
to form something like a dual system in the Western 
group of nations, which divide them, more or less 
equally, and with many cross - divisions, into two 
camps. They are principles, moreover, which sub- 
divide each nation within itself, and separate them 
into rival and counterbalancing parties. 

At the head of these two great groups of nations 
in Europe, of these two principles which divide each 
nation, stand respectively England and- France. One 
or other of them is the fair representative and type 
of every one of these elements of European society, 
though neither expresses them in a quite exclusive 
form. Round England centre the sympathies of all in 

H 



98 ENGLAND AND FEANCE. 

Europe that is Teutonic, Protestant, conservative, par- 
liamentary, and commercial. France, in like manner, 
is the centre of the Latin, the Catholic, the democratic, 
the centralised, and the revolutionary element. The 
action of England and of France is so closely identified 
with these respective principles that neither power 
alone can give any continuous support to a movement 
identified with the principles of the other party. 

Over the smaller seaboard peoples of Europe the 
influence of England is in the ascendant. Over Den- 
mark, Holland, Scandinavia, over Portugal and Tur- 
key, the prestige of England reigns as in a congenial 
soil. This is the result of an obvious identity of in- 
terest or pursuit, and the fact that these smaller 
Powers are in an especial manner brought face to 
face with her material strength and maritime do- 
minion. Scandinavia, Holland, and North Germany 
see in her the principal and most systematically Pro- 
testant Power. Prussia, Holland, and Italy neces- 
sarily look towards her for the type of those parlia- 
m.entary and constitutional systems which they seem 
bent on developing for themselves. It is part of the 
traditions of the Austrian crown that it owes its very 
existence to England; and hateful to our ears as is 
the aristocratic dogma of our " ancient alliance" with 
Austria, to her, in spite of her irritation, it is a grim 
necessity to cling to and to uphold. For to England 
turn the eyes of all who dread violent change, as well 
as of all who apprehend aggression. All feel that 
England is the only one of the great Powers of Europe 
who can gain nothing and who will not profit by dy- 
nastic and territorial revolution on the Continent. 

England (which in the East is the great disturber 
of nations) in Europe is naturally identified with com- 



EJJGLAND AND FEANCE. 99 

merce, industry, and peace. Her government again, as 
the only government of Europe which has never suf- 
fered an external overthrow, and for two centuries has 
suffered no approach to an internal convulsion, is the 
great sjmnbol of stability in the "West. Her crown — 
by far the oldest and most illustrious of all the crowns 
of Europe, as being a great European monarchy at a 
time when Hapsburgs and Brandenburgs, Romanoffs 
and Dukes of Savoy, were robber chiefs ; when Italy 
was a network of republics, Germany a collection of 
baronies, and Spain was occupied by Moors — is now, 
since the extinction of the shadow of the Empire and 
the fall of the House of Capet, the great centre of all 
the historical traditions. In a word, England is felt 
to represent and to support upon the* Continent the 
sentiment of order, national stability, recognised law, 
and historical permanence, of personal freedom, of free 
speech, of equal justice, of administrative independ- 
ence, the expansion of industry, free trade, and com- 
mercial intercourse, the maintenance of ancient rights 
and resistance to wanton change, the independence of 
the smallest member of the European family of na- 
tions. It is a leading and a noble part that she plays 
amongst them; though the least reflection will show 
that it is but one side of the European movement, 
but one element of our modern civilisation of which 
she is the recognised organ, and that one not the 
most characteristic. 

We turn now to France, which in the other great 
side of the European movement possesses a still more 
imquestioned predominance. She is the recognised 
head of the Latin race, between the members of 
which, for several reasons, historical as well as po- 
litical, there is a much stronger bond than exists 



100 ENGLAND AND FEANCE. 

between nations of Teutonic origin. She is the real 
head of Catholicism, partly as being by far the most 
powerful of the Catholic Powers, partly because she 
holds the Papacy in her hand. Quite apart from the 
actual muster-roll of her armies, which may vary 
with political circumstances and parties, she is un- 
questionably the first military power of the Conti- 
nent, and that by the surest of all titles — the native 
genius of her people for war. None contest her claim 
to be the second naval power in Europe, not so much 
from the number and equipment of her ships of war, 
her Gloires and her Cherbourgs, but again from the 
high aptitude of her sons for scientific warfare whe- 
ther on land or sea, the extent of her coasts, the ex- 
cellence of her ports, her commercial activity, and 
her ancient maritime traditions. In industrial de- 
velopment, in manufacturing energy, the French 
people are second only to ourselves, and if organi- 
sation and art are regarded in industry, almost our 
equals. All these are, it is true, but minor requi- 
sites of national greatness, but they are indispensable, 
and without them no nation can pretend, in our pre- 
sent state of opinion, to occupy a prominent rank. 

The great distinctive feature of France as a nation 
is, however, the very simple one of her geographical 
position. Her border closely abuts on at least seven 
of the European states. In the system of Western 
Europe she distinctly occupies the centre, and is the 
only Power in close local connection with England. 
Local connection, of course, is of great importance in 
governing international relations. No one who re- 
flects on the innumerable channels through which 
movements, social, political, and literary, radiate from 
Paris throughout Europe, can fail to recognise the 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 101 

imjDortance of occupying this geographical centre. 
Let us conceive the relative weight of an insurrec- 
tion or a change of government in Paris and in any 
other capital in Europe. There is but one city of 
Europe towards which gravitate the cultivated and 
thoughtful of every nation, in the movements, ideas, 
arts, and habits of which all take a greater or a less 
interest. Let us compare the relative degree of 
publicity and value which popularly attaches to 
any political scheme, any social, historical, or politi- 
cal theory propounded in Paris, and one propounded 
in any existing city. The Parisian press, publi- 
cists, and jurists alone can be called common to 
Europe. The undisputed acceptance of the French 
language as the common political and international 
medium is, if we give its true place to language, 
almost by itself decisive. Let Frenchmen assert a 
statement, however contrary to fact; promulgate a 
social system, however chimerical; or be suspected 
of a design, however extravagant, all for a time will 
hold their ground in the mind of Europe with vita- 
lity out of proportion to their merit. It does not 
advance the question to insist that all this is but to 
the discredit of the other peoples of Europe; that they 
should travel to other cities, use some other language, 
read some other writers, study other arts, ideas, and 
movements than those of France. All we are now 
concerned with is the fact. As a matter of fact, 
taking one people with another and one subject with 
another, the bulk of the people of Europe do turn in 
the questions of social life in an especial manner to 
France. However various the causes, trivial or irra- 
tional as they may be, if politically and morally 
Europe can be said to be one whole, and if one whole, 



102 ENGLAND AND ERANCE. 

to have a common centre, tlie instinct of the greater 
number points for that centre to Paris. 

This is precisely one of those questions most likely 
to be embarrassed by strong prejudice, and on which, 
from na^tional feeling and from its own great complex- 
ity, it is most difficult to preserve a judicial fairness 
of mind. But no political writer would be worthy 
of the name who had not thoroughly weighed it with 
conscientious and patient discrimination. Let us try 
to correct any personal predilection and antipathy by 
the calm test of historical fact, and see if there be 
any thing in the ancient position of France to ex- 
plain or support her modern pretensions. A very 
simple question seems crucial. Can it be said that 
if the history of Europe smce the fall of the Koman 
Empire be surveyed as a whole, this history would be 
so completely eviscerated by the loss of all mention 
of any other European country as it would be by 
the loss of that of France? Once blot France out of 
the historical map, and it would become unintelli- 
gible. A slight effort of the imagination may assist 
us to understand the case ; and if we can conceive 
as effaced the very memory of Charlemagne, of the 
House of Capet and of Bourbon, of the first Crusade, 
of Louis IX., of Louis XL, of Henry lY., of Eiche- 
lieu, Colbert, and Louis XIY., of the Convention, the 
Republic of '92, and of the two Napoleons, we can 
estimate the relative value of the residuum of Euro- 
pean history. The country which for 1000 years has 
filled this space in the minds of men must have gained 
a real, if unrecognised, prerogative in the comitia of 
nations. 

JSTor must another great peculiarity of France be 
overlooked. She is essentially European. Her in- 



ENGLAND AND TRANCE. 103 

terests and policy must necessarily be guided on 
European bases. Not so exclusively European that 
she is without points of contact with the other conti- 
nents, she is still free from the embarrassment and 
distraction which colonial and maritime interests in- 
troduce into general questions. The extra-European 
interests of England are so enormous that they sel- 
dom leave her free to pursue a purely European 
poHcy. Russia, in one half of her vast dominions, 
is the mistress of mere Asiatics. Neither Prussia 
nor Austria have any interests beyond their own 
continent; but they are both so exclusively conti- 
nental and inland, that it diminishes rather than in- 
creases their influence here. France, on the other 
hand, has enough to connect her with transmarine 
races, but not enough to disturb her action at home. 
Whilst England and Eussia have wide maritime and 
Oriental interests, those of France are strictly con- 
tinental, European, and concentrated. 

Yet another consideration, and one of an import- 
ance which it is almost impossible to exaggerate. In 
estimatuig the moral weight and even the material 
strength which any nation can bring to the great 
questions of European politics, nothing is more impor- 
tant than the greater or less degree in which they are 
chargeable with national oppression, and the character 
for moderation and unselfishness which they possess. 
Let us read the protocols of the Treaty of Paris, and 
contrast the moral weight of Count Buol with that of 
Count Cavour ; and even remember the moral power 
of England at the Congress of Yienna, which her 
unselfish, though mistaken, policy procured her. 
Of the actual five European Powers, England and 
France alone are decently free from this fatal weak- 



104 ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 

ness. The crimes of the Kussian domination in Po- 
land, Lapland, and Turkey ; of Austrian domination 
in Galicia, in Hungary, in Yenetia ; of Prussian do- 
mination in Posen and Denmark, identify these three 
Powers with oppression, and colour all their action 
and their character in Europe. On England herself 
the memory of her Indian aggressions, subjugations, 
and revolts, her Asiatic empire, her Chinese, her 
Japanese, her perennial colonial wars, her monstrous 
maritime rapacity and arrogance, hang as a dead 
weight, dragging down her fame. There is but one 
modern nation which never closes the temple of 
Janus, and that nation is England. Nor can an old 
man recall the period at which British soldiers v/ere 
not engaged in some corner of the world. We esteem 
ourselves happy if we chance not to be engaged in 
several. As I write, English soldiers are in the field 
in four distinct wars of race in as many great divi- 
sions of the globe. To us a source of pride as well 
as a supposed means of gain, these ceaseless foreign 
expeditions damage our honour in Europe as much 
as they disturb and weaken our policy. We have, too, 
our special weakness. Blinded by long habit, and 
conscious of at least good intentions in these latter 
years, the English nation forgets its position in Ire- 
land, as that of a dominant race still hated by a sub- 
jugated nation, still alien in religion, manners, and 
traditions, and loaded by the memory of seven cen- 
turies of selfish misgovernment. We jest almost 
at the thought of being ourselves national oppressors 
at home, and for the moment our confidence is just. 
But Europe has not learned the difference between 
our government in Ireland now and our government 
as it has been for seven centuries ; and the oppressors 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 105 

of the Magyar, the A^enetian, and the Pole can still 
point bitmg retorts at the perplexed rulers of the 
Irish Kelt. France in Europe is almost free from 
any similar weakness. Her occupation of Eome is 
a special and complex case, which, with all its evils, 
is yet in its nature temporary, and not in its form op- 
pressive. Her aggressions and domination m Algeria 
form a fatal wound in her side, less damaging to 
her than our own Oriental and maritime oppression, 
because neither so incessant or so colossal, and not 
so injurious to mankind, not flung broadcast over the 
eai'th. This great wrong and cause of wrong, this grand 
national blunder, this wretched military and dynastic 
caprice, once redressed and undone, the case of France 
as an aggressor, but for Nice, stands almost clear. As 
it is (and this is for opinion almost everything) France 
is the only one of the five great Powers which, neither 
by ahen domination or imperfect incorporation, op- 
presses, insults, or misgoverns any one of the races of 
Europe ; which has neither a Warsaw, a Hungary, a 
Yenetia, or a Posen, neither a Gibraltar or an Ireland. 
It is but a corollary of this which appears in her 
wonderful national cohesion and unity. France may 
be said to be the only perfectly homologous nation in 
Europe. Russia Avith her cancer in Poland, Austria 
with her wen in Hungary, stand at one end of the 
scale ; France stands at the other. The Spanish and 
the Italian populations are both cohesive in a high 
degree ; but the unity of neither is equal to that of 
France. The Piedmontese and the Neapolitan have 
not learned to feel as the children of one fatherland ; 
the Moor, the Goth, and the Kelt in Spain are not 
yet whoUy amalgamated. Prussia with her patch- 
work of duchies; Austria mth her hostile races; 



106 ENGLAND AND EEANCE. 

little Switzerland with her trilingual feuds; even 
England with her Irish difficulties, can none of them 
pretend to the complete fusion, the organic unity, the 
intense concentration which binds together as one 
man the forty millions of the French race. 

But there is another consideration of a very dif- 
ferent kind, which, were all the preceding conditions 
different from what they are, would suffice to mark 
off France as possessing a special function in Europe. 
In France is found the origin, the centre, and the im- 
pulse of that Eevolution which is as truly European 
as it is French. This is not the place to analyse or 
discuss this great historical movement ; it is sufficient 
for our purpose that it is an axiom acknowledged by 
all competent inquirers that this Eevolution is at 
once the issue of the past and the cradle of the future 
civilisation of Europe ; that France is but the scene 
of its acute crisis, the centre from which it is destined 
to radiate through the European system. The tho- 
rough comprehension of this, the key of all modern 
history, is the first and indispensable qualification for 
a statesman; and the vacillations and helplessness of 
the politicians of the old school are mainly due to the 
fact that they attempt to deal with the problems of 
Europe whilst ignoring the first conditions of their 
solution. To officials bred up in the purblind doc- 
trines of Pitt and Castlereagh the French Revolution 
may appear as a mere national, rebellion, once big with 
portents and horrors, but long since crushed or ex- 
hausted. It is time that politicians saw it, as histo- 
rical students see it, to be a real regeneration of 
modern society, of which as yet nothing but the ini- 
tial convulsions are past, and in which as yet but one 
people has fully participated. 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 107 

That Revolution in its political aspect implies the 
abolition of every form of hereditary government, 
whether resting on force, tradition, class, or caste, 
and the substitution for it of a government of per- 
sonal fitness, actively recognised by the governed, 
and maintained by them in the sole interest of the 
common social progress. This involves the gradual 
extmction of all modes of political rule derived from 
birth, of the hereditary principle in all its phases, whe- 
ther monarchic, feudal, or industrial, aiid the resettle- 
ment of the state system on national and geographical 
bases. It implies in its social aspect the extinction 
of the arbitrary classification according to the aristo- 
cratic hierarchy, and the substitution of the natural 
classification of personal merit. In its moral aspect 
it implies the subjection of individual propensities to 
a recognised code of social duty. In the intellectual 
aspect it implies a common system of belief, resting 
on free and accepted demonstration, and the main- 
tenance of that faith by an organised system of edu- 
cation. This conception, as a whole, of a regenerated 
social existence has penetrated in a general way 
France alone among the nations, and even her but 
incompletely. Yet no unpledged observer doubts the 
degree to which it has modified the others, and the 
certainty of its ultimate establishment in all. Those 
who watch events from the ground of history rather 
than party can see in the spasm which shook Europe 
in 1830; in the revolutions which convulsed it in 
1848 ; in the revulsion of public opinion since the 
close of the great war which separates us as by a gulf 
from the ideas of Alexander, Pitt, and Metternich ; in 
the resurrection of Italy as a nation ; in the revival 
of Spain; in the disintegration of the German prin- 



108 ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 

cipalities ; in the mode in which the movements and 
ideas of Europe react on our own home politics and 
thoughts, and still more on those of others; in the 
subterranean surging of the revolutionary forces from 
Glasgow to Naples, from Warsaw to Madrid, the sure 
signs of this stupendous movement, its might, and its 
centre-point. And a politician is distinctly disqualified 
for his task who ignores the importance of this principle 
in all political questions whatever, or ignores the truth 
that France is at once its embodiment and its apostle. 
It results from all the precedmg considerations 
— from her geographical position, from her military, 
naval, and industrial renown, from her language, 
history, literature, and general prestige, from the 
spontaneous adoption of her ideas, tone, and aims, 
but chiefly from her being the centre of the great 
movement — that France possesses a priority or initi- 
ative in the progressive civilisation of Europe, very 
difficult to define with exactness, but which cannot 
be gainsay ed. In a subject like this, nothing can be 
less in place than puerile comparisons between na- 
tions; but only the shallowest vanity can prevent us 
from determining the relative duties of each nation. 
England and France, like the rest, have each their 
parts ; and neither would be competent to fulfil the 
office of the other. No thoughtful reader will see in 
this statement any crude classification of nations, or 
the affectation of adjudging absolute inferiority or 
superiority to any. All that is here implied by the 
initiative of France is the truth visible in present 
facts, and naturally to be expected from the survey 
of the past, that most of the ideas which move mo- 
dern society are first or most strongly enunciated in 
France ; and, on the other hand, that what the French 



ENGLAND AND FKANCE. 109 

people proclaim is received, on the whole, with the 
largest share of attention by the rest of Europe. A 
statement so simple and so like a truism can scarcely 
awaken the most sensitive self-love; and English- 
men may explain it as they please, but they can 
hardly venture to deny it. It amounts to little more 
than to say that principles adopted in France are ex- 
pressed in a form and language and with an energy 
which are most favourable to their dissemination ; 
and, on the other hand, that no people in Europe 
have so immediate a machinery for carrying their 
ideas amongst others. The people who within the 
last 100 years succeeded in pouring their victorious 
armies over five countries of Europe simultaneously, 
and raised an empire (in a measure an empire of 
ideas) coextensive with the western half of the Con- 
tinent, have earned for any policy that they espouse 
a very special interest. And the country which re- 
presents the greatest number of the interests of mo- 
dern European nations, and whose movements are 
most rapidly felt by the greatest number of those 
nations ; which possesses the most numerous relations 
with them, and stands most nearly in an intermediate 
position in the antagonisms which agitate them, is na- 
turally that country the action of which most power- 
fully determines that of the rest. That country is 
obviously France ; and if we attribute a distinct initia- 
tive in Europe to her, it is but to resume the familiar 
notion that in the public questions of Europe the atti- 
tude of France is awaited as of critical importance. 

IV. 

When we sum up the various conclusions which 



110 ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 

the two modes of investigation, the historical and the 
political, have given us, we learn that, so far from 
France and England having been natural antago- 
nists, so far from enmity or even rivalry having 
been their normal conditioui, they have been, in the 
higher sense of political sympathies, inseparable col- 
leagues and natural allies. The greater rulers 
of both countries have systematically encouraged 
friendship between them. From the Middle Ages 
down to the Coalition the two countries have never 
been engaged in any obstinate and ineradicable an- 
tagonism of policy, except when all Northern Eu- 
rope was banded to crush the headlong ambition of 
Louis XIY. It may be said, if we except this period, 
that England has never exercised any influence in 
Europe at once commanding and beneficent, unless 
she has been acting in concert with France. The 
very notion of the natural antipathy and contrast 
between ourselves and our neighbours is a remnant 
only of the retrograde passions which inspired the 
Coalition of Pitt. To speak of France as a natural 
antagonist is the part of men whose views of state- 
craft are drawn from the later ravings of Burke, to 
whom history has no lessons earlier than Marlborough. 
Calmer reasoning and broader knowledge bring us 
to the very opposite belief. And if the last decade 
has done much to extinguish these irrational jDreju- 
dices, it is due not to the Napoleons or Palmerstons, 
nor even to commercial treaties and Oriental alliances, 
but to the fact that the calming of the revolutionary 
movement in France has coincided with its progress 
in England ; that as the area of its influence has been 
widened, the violence of its action has been reduced ; 
and France and England have been drawn together 



ENGLAND AND PRANCE. Ill 

in their natural task of coordinating the progress of 
Europe. 

Their special fitness for this duty our review of 
the state of Europe has suggested. We have seen 
that they together represent nearly all the leading 
interests and ideas within it; that one or other is 
recognised as its natural chief by nearly every state 
and every aggregate of states; that the strength of 
each depends on its being truly coordinate ; that their 
united force and prestige is distinctly paramount over 
all. Of the two the position of France is at once the 
more central, the more influential, and the more apt 
to originate. But nearly the whole strength of her 
position is neutralised unless England is cooperating 
with her ; and amidst all the differences of their parts, 
the convergence of their real interests and tendencies 
is profoundly manifest. 

The problem before us is to establish the basis, 
and to define the ends which systematic cooperation 
requires. 

This will be the place to consider the proposal 
which has acquired importance rather from the cha- 
racter of its authors than its own intrinsic value. 
It has been growing up as a maxim with a certain 
vigorous and honest body of politicians, that the 
true policy of a country like England is to with- 
draw almost entirely from diplomatic or national 
action in any state of Europe ; that her sole duty is 
to be friendly with all, to have alliances and even 
relations with none. That such a paradox should 
have obtained any support, that it should have se- 
duced the most conscientious and sagacious of our 
public men, is a singular proof of the disorganisation 
of all political doctrines. Nothing but the aimless t^ 



112 ENGLAND AND PRANCE. 

imbecility into which our recent diplomacy has de- 
generated can explain such a blunder in men of the 
high moral and intellectual vigour of Mr. Cobden 
and Mr. Bright. Seeing, as they do, that in the 
hands of aristocratic statesmen of the old school 
political action on the Continent ends in little but 
spiritless meddling, without vigour, system, or prin- 
ciple, they might well be forgiven for believing that 
no end can be put to such a course but by a period 
of rest and abstinence. But for any end less tem- 
porary a real and systematic foreign policy is ab- 
solutely essential ; and the only effectual mode of 
closing the era of weak and restless intervention is 
to substitute for it a system of definite action. Mr. 
Cobden and Mr. Bright have been deceiving them- 
selves, or are deceived. They have been in this but 
the mouthpiece of a party to which they are them- 
selves immeasurably superior. Their o^vn objects 
and motives have done honour to their genius ; but 
the real scheme of the apostles of peace and non-in- 
tervention at any cost is to make national well-being 
consist in the unrestricted development of individual 
industry. Free trade, peace, commerce, industry, 
are mth them the ends, not the means, of public 
prosperity. The happiness of nations does not con- 
sist any more than that of men in the free accumu- 
lation of capital. Growing rich is to a people just 
what it is to a man. Civilisation means a great deal 
more than labour, and more than material wealth 
and industrial cultivation. It means the uniform 
education of the human powers, whether in commu- 
nities or in man ; and of these the social and generous 
instincts are the highest. It implies an intricate 
social iinion ; control, government, and association ; 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 113 

it cannot exist without mutual support, trust, and 
cooperation ; the protection of the weak by the strong ; 
the subordination of the unwise to the wise ; the 
combination of all in common duties ; the sacrifice 
of many personal desires ; the willingness to bear the 
common burdens. 

These trite maxims of common morality, which, 
whatever we may practise, all of us recognise in pri- 
vate life, yet require to be repeated when we deal 
with public and national concerns. As applied to 
the members of a nation, no one gainsays or miscon- 
ceives these familiar truths. The blindest votary of 
the new doctrines does not propose as a panacea for 
our public difficulties that every man should confine 
himself to the afikirs of his own county, his own 
city, or his own parish. Pushed to its extreme, the 
total disregard of all social interests is admitted to be 
the meanest form of selfishness. But if citizens have 
national duties, they have, for just the same reasons, 
international duties as well. There is nothing mys- 
terious about the aggregate we call a nation. The 
aggregate which forms the state system of Europe 
is just as real, and if it is somewhat less definite, it 
is in some points of view decidedly more important. 
The progress of civilisation for us depends ultimately 
and in the long-run even more upon the state of 
Europe than on the state of any particular nation. 
The moral, intellectual, and industrial growth of Eng- 
land, speaking in the highest sense, is determined 
by that of the West as a whole. If by moral growth 
v/e mean a wiser and more generous public opinion ; 
by intellectual growth, the more systematic culti- 
vation of the whole mental powers ; by industrial 
growth, not the mere accretion of capital, but a hap- 

I 



114 ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 

pier organisation of labour (and no lower estimate 
is wortliy of thinker, politician, or citizen), then we 
may be sure that the progress of our people in these 
things is never very far removed from the progress 
of the people around us. From the other nations of 
Europe we draw the raw stuff of our civilisation, 
material, scientific, and educational. Thought is ab- 
solutely common to us all. The highest scientific 
and philosophical truths which ultimately form our 
intellectual standards, and without which even manu- 
factures would stand still, come to us in far larger 
proportion from across the seas than from this island. 
We carry abroad freer conceptions of commerce, and 
we benefit by the lessons we have taught. We come 
back with teaching on the condition of the labourer, 
and we profit profoundly by our study. The poli- 
tical affinities are no less powerful. Good govern- 
ment amongst our neighbours is a dangerous exam- 
ple for bad government at home. The triumph of 
progress and freedom there gives new life to our 
political activity. Nor is this less true of the other 
nations in their turn than it is of ourselves. This 
intercommunion of tone, aims, and ideas permeates 
all alike. If Englishmen have the closest relations 
with their neighbours in Europe, scientific, educa- 
tional, moral, industrial, and social, they cannot 
avoid having political relations also. Civilisation is 
a very complex whole. A healthy political condi- 
tion is one of its indispensable conditions, as of all 
living men our two popular leaders have most ear- 
nestly maintained. A diseased political state will 
arrest and distort for a time every other kind of 
development. Industry is but a side of the work 
of civilisation, and it is just that side of it which 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 115 

convulsion or syncope of the political organism can 
most effectually damage. The regeneration of Euro- 
pean society, the working out of the people to a 
better state, a time of peaceful union, industrial or- 
ganisation, and universal education — for this is the 
true meaning of the great Revolution — is a move- 
ment eminently European, and not national or local. 
But one of its first conditions, one of its most im- 
portant results, is that of political regeneration and 
national resettlement. And this is no less European 
than the still wider movement of which it is but a 
part. Each nation is interested alike in the good 
government of all. Without it peace, commerce, 
and progress are impossible. Each nation also can 
do much to promote it. But the mode in which it 
alone can do so systematically and eifectually is by 
generous and resolute cooperation in the common 
councils of all. Few nations can with advantage 
interfere in the separate affairs of a neighbour ; but 
all together, and that by means no less peaceful than 
efficient, can give the most powerful impulse to good 
government in any, and can certainly guarantee it 
from interference from without. An instance of no 
small value is now before our eyes. The story of 
the struggle in America brings before us a people 
to whom there has been " irresistibly brought home 
the influence which sound political conditions exert 
upon neighbours. The States of New England might 
on the new theory have devoted themselves wholly to 
till their corn-fields and develop their manufactures, 
to improve their education, to elevate their people, 
without a thought of the political condition of their 
distant and unconnected fellow states. Their in- 
stinct told them truly — and no one honoured them 



116 ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 

more for it than Mr. Cobden and Mr. Briglit — that 
the political and social condition of New Orleans and 
Carolina concerned them more than any earthly con- 
sideration. That cancer in the political aggregate 
of states retarded and poisoned their own public life, 
and made it essential to be eradicated at whatever 
cost and before any other thought. May so deep 
a cancer never here need so terrific a remedy ! But 
for many purposes the union which really holds 
throughout the great political organism of Western 
Europe is far deeper and closer than that which 
held the half-independent States of America. A re- 
volution in Paris, a national uprising in Italy, Hun- 
gary, or Poland, concerns us more than the local 
agitations of Alabama would concern the farmers of 
New England. The political condition of Europe 
indeed concerns us in a degree only second to the 
political condition of England. We can affect it im- 
mensely if we will; and whether we will or not, it 
deeply affects us. Civilisation is a tree which has 
many roots as well as many branches ; and man is 
a political creature even earlier and more innately 
than he is an industrial creature. The political side 
of progress is one of its first and its greatest. Poli- 
tical indifferentism is as dangerous as it is immoral. 
Nor can quietism be raised into a creed by a nation 
of worth, any more than it can by a man of sense. 

These are but some only of the great grounds 
which history and philosophy ahke supply to prove 
the absolute necessity no less than the paramount 
duty of fulfilling our national functions. On grounds 
less firmly based it would be unwise to rest so criti- 
cal a principle. Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright are men 
far too clearsighted and patriotic to be answered by 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 117 

taunts and sophisms. The credit their teaching in 
this matter enjoys is due ^only to this — that they are 
shown nothing solid in modern diplomacy, and they 
are met too often by insolent appeals to the national 
covetousness or pride. When a practical path is 
shown them by which England can exercise her just 
influence in Europe — an influence at once peace- 
ful and efi*ective — they will be the first to welcome 
it. Let them hesitate, however, before, in despair 
of arrivmg at this, they invoke a course which the 
nation's instinct repudiates, and which would be 
worse even than the disease. To leave for a mo- 
ment the ground of morality and duty — and no poli- 
ticians more consistently regard it than these two — 
it would not be difficult to show that on purely eco- 
nomic grounds the consequences of national isolation 
would prove most disastrous. They complain — and 
most justly — of the enormous growth of our mi- 
litary and naval expenditure. Fortifications and 
engineering experiments are favourite resources to 
gain popularity for a minister or a party; but to 
make any grand reduction in oar armaments whilst 
France and the rest of Europe are still armed to the 
teeth, is a plan to which no tongue whatever can per- 
suade our people to submit. But the armaments of 
France are directed not so much against us as against 
the Continental Powers. The army of France is kept 
on foot chiefly by the armies of Germany. These 
exist because Italy, Poland, and Hungary at any 
moment may renew the eflbrt for national existence. 
The House of Austria is still involuntarily, as in the 
days of Henry, the source of the uneasiness of Eu- 
rope. It has no further function in Europe, and re- 
tards and disturbs its progress. The army of Austria, 



118 ENGLAND AND FEANCE. 

again, is the cause, but not the excuse, of the army 
of Prussia. Prussia, again, is in terror for the utter 
rottenness of her precarious empire, and watches with 
mingled dread and hope the political throes of the 
German Powers. Each petty sovereign keeps up his 
toy-army from old feudal pride and conscious mse- 
curity. But another and even more powerful cause 
remains. Outside this German frontier, beyond the 
pale of Western civilisation, the enormous hordes of 
the Kussian despot stand for ever under arms. Ger- 
many, which for political reasons shrinks back from 
the West, for military reasons must turn mth defiance 
to the East. Thus the great Continental armies exist, 
and will exist until the political ulcers are excised, 
and until union gives Europe strength to disregard 
the Oriental legions of Russia. 

Agreement between France and England could do 
much, and much at once, to mitigate this evil of ''mili- 
tarism" (as the noblest soldier of our age has called 
it), which drains and poisons our industrial energy. 
But nothing can well suppress it except the one re- 
medy of political resettlement. Whilst Eussia, revo- 
lution, and nationalities alternately threaten Germany, 
she will have her million and a half of bayonets on 
foot. Whilst she has these, France will have her 
half million, and England her quarter million. The 
evil is not with us two so much as with the retro- 
grade Powers of the East. It springs not so much 
of aristocratic misgovernment or monarchic pride as 
of a chronic political unrest. To end this alone is 
to pass from a military to an industrial epoch. To 
mitigate its convulsions, to moderate its violence, is 
to do much to neutralise its evils, immediate and re- 
mote. When Europe is settled politically and nation- 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 119 

ally, her armies will be disbanded, but not till then; 
and only as we cooperate in obtaining for her and 
for ourselves this political and national resettlement 
— a state which shall at once be order and progress 
— can we approach the time when the British, nation 
will consent, even if it pre\dously were able, to cut 
off the scandalous profusion of our military expen- 
diture. 

Now whilst entire apathy to the political move- 
ment of Europe is felt by all but a few fanatics to be 
a course as degrading as it is extravagant, there is 
still cherished by a certain school the idea of found- 
ing a system of entire neutrality. With these men, 
whatever relations with foreign countries England 
is to maintain, they are never to exceed a passive 
goodwill and a studied impartiality. The commerce 
of all nations should be welcomed in her ports, as 
the ports of all nations should be opened to her 
commerce. An interchange of capital, the inter- 
course of the citizens, the exchange of products, and 
international exhibitions, should give what is want- 
ing of noble to this bond of material interest. Each 
bale of goods, cries the able financier, comes bearing 
a message of friendship. Such a view as this, if 
meant for a political principle, savours either of the 
cant of the rhetorician or the pettiness of the trades- 
man. That commercial can override political ques- 
tions permanently is an idea to which no one with 
the instinct of a statesman should yield. The buy- 
ing and selling of articles amongst the people of a 
nation does not necessarily involve the fusion of all 
classes and the extinction of all political struggles. 
No one can regard the history of Europe and its 
present condition in the light of such a sketch as 



120 ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 

has preceded, without recognising in it as a whole 
the unity and method of a state system, and the 
great scale of the forces with which that system is 
charged. Compared to them, the crude motive of 
mercantile profit (which has been the stimulus often 
of the most selfish and ruinous extravagances) is 
indeed uncertain and futile. In international, pre- 
cisely as in national movements those who take part 
must stand on definite political principles, and take 
some definite attitude towards the great ideas or so- 
cial changes which are at stake. Human society, on 
the largest as on the smallest scale, is far too com- 
plex and noble to be reduced to the measure of any 
market whatever; and it is as absurd to look for the 
solution of all pohtical questions in Europe, even by 
the advent of a Millennium of Free Trade, as it 
would be to hope to quell a revolution at home by a 
reduction of discount. 

Keal neutrality in all European movements being 
practically impossible for this country, it may be use- 
ful to examine some of the chief political relations 
which have been advocated or pursued. In that 
absence of any intelligible principle — which has so 
long marked our vacillating policy ^ — almost every 
possible alliance has been tried or recommended by 
ministries and parties. It was even once the idea 
of a school of half-hearted reactionists to associate 
ourselves in an intimate manner with Russia. An 
alliance with Turkey or China would be hardly more 
absurd. As Russia differs from England in every so- 
cial, political, and historical condition (to say nothing 
of her being outside the state system of Europe), to 
associate our policy mth hers is simply to appeal to 
the old method of material force, and to retire os- 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 121 

tentatiously from the field of opinion, progress, and 
moral weight. The party which regards Russia as 
any thing but as a Power whose ambition must be 
watched whilst its barbarism must be educated, is 
at once unfit to bear rule or give counsel in a free 
and advancing nation. 

An alliance with Prussia, or even North Ger- 
many, which has been occasionally suggested, must 
appear, at any rate in the light of recent events, as 
an alliance with that one of the great Powers which 
is politically the most uncertain and materially the 
most feeble — an alliance which leaves simply out of 
the question the whole of the Catholic revolutionary 
and democratic forces of the Continent. It would 
oifer none of the stability and strength of the Rus- 
sian alliance, whilst it shares in part many of its 
evils. The same reasoning applies just as forcibly, 
and, in spite of the traditions of an efifete school, 
is far more applicable to the Austrian alliance — 
that with the South rather than the North of Ger- 
many. Indeed, so hopelessly is the empire in its 
present form doomed to extinction, so thoroughly 
identified is it with all that remains of reactionary 
in Europe, that to identify our policy with hers, 
even in subordinate matters, is to look to secure the 
stability and progress of Europe by identifying our- 
selves with the interests of its most rotten element. 
The voice of all that is reasonable and liberal* in Eng- 
land has been for a generation so loudly pronounced 
against this remnant of our worst system of blunder- 
ing, that it is as little worth discussing an alliance 
with South Germany as with North Germany. A 
united Germany, as a political unit, is as yet a pro- 
fessor's dream. 



122 ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 

An alliance or permanent relations with any of 
the other European Powers need hardly detain us for 
consideration. Any one or more of these smaller 
nations, however proper to receive our friendship and 
help, cannot seriously be proposed as a basis of com- 
bination. A continental policy for England obviously 
implies relations with one of the first-rate Powers. 
There is, however, another alternative. There re- 
mains to be considered another political connection, 
which at first sight offers far more than any of those 
which have been considered, and is vigorously advo- 
cated by a powerful and able party. The creed of 
the only political school of growing importance is an 
intimate alliance mth America — an alliance at once 
political, social, and material — or in its full form a 
combination of the entire Anglo-Saxon race. By this 
would be implied a close identification of interest, 
and a combined action of all the races of the globe 
which speak the English tongue. The conception has 
a solid truth at its base, and is a fruitful and intelli- 
gible principle. There can be no doubt that such a 
union would be a very desirable, a very feasible, and 
a very pregnant consummation. It would lead to 
great and valuable political ends. It would certainly 
represent an enormous force, material as well as mo- 
ral, and a vast expansion of industrial life. 

For all this, however, it is not, and can never be, 
a cardinal political idea. An Anglo-Saxon alliance, 
however intimate and however powerful, never can 
reach to the level of the true European questions. 
It is not a harmony or balance of elements and in- 
terests, it is simply the augmentation of one. With 
all the points of difi'erence, the Anglo-Saxon race is, 
for aU European purposes, virtually one. It repre- 



ENGLAND AND ERANCE. 123 

sents one set of ideas, of political forces and affinities. 
The whole of the elements represented by France still 
remain outside of it. Anglo- Saxonism is, after all, an 
idea, like that of Panslavism, Teutonism, or the Latin 
race; an idea which has a real basis, but is exagge- 
rated into absurdity. It is only a variety of national 
egoism. Anglo- Saxondom will, and even now does, 
represent a preponderating material force ; but as a 
key of human progress it is a vaunt or an imposture. 
There would remain outside of it, and without de- 
fined relation to it, the whole of those problems of 
the European state system with which the Continent 
is big. The reorganisation of Germany, the repres- 
sion of Eussia, the revival of Italy and Spain, the re- 
settlement of Europe, the grand political and social 
crises of France, the bulk, in fact, of the intellectual, 
social, and practical movements of Europe, ayouM be 
things at which the Saxon union would look on, but 
which it would not be vitally concerned in or able 
essentially to modify. Looking at the region of ideas 
and the moral forces of nations, it would bring Eng- 
land httle nearer to the real life of the West. No one 
but a man driven crazy by national vanity could sup- 
pose that the true solution of aU European difficulties 
would be at once obtained, if England were suddenly 
doubled in population, wealth, and energy. And 
speaking in the light of European progress as a 
whole, the coalition of America and England would 
do little more than this. America is, after all, another 
self, freed happily from many of the burdens of its 
parent, but devoid also of much of its laborious edu- 
cation in civilisation. America, like England, has her 
place^ — a great and a noble part — amongst the heads 
of human progress ; but that part is as the colleague 



124 ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 

and counterpart of England. The function of each is 
not the complement of the other. And it is only an 
age infatuated with material success which can claim 
for the material development of America an influence 
on the destinies of Europe akin to that which eight 
centuries of effort and of growth, their European 
position, relations, and traditions have given to the 
Anglo-Saxon people of this island. 

In point of fact, the union of America with Eng- 
land, such as it is conceived by the economic school 
of politicians, would be by itself rather a curse than 
a blessing to the rest of the human family. Valuable 
as that union would be when subordinated to greater 
political relations and fixed international duties, a 
mere league of the two branches of the English race, 
to push their settlements, their trade, and their in- 
fluence to indefinite limits, would indeed be a formid- 
able bar to human progress. It would mean England 
practically withdrawn from all her legitimate duties 
in Europe; for her enormous power would be the 
principal menace to the combined nations, whilst it 
gave her but small means of controlling them. It 
would mean political progress drowned in the torrent 
of industrial expansion. It would mean a maritime 
supremacy ten times more tyrannical and galling than 
of old; more empires founded in the East; more 
races of dark men sacrificed to the pitiless genius of 
Free Trade, and at the bloodstained altar of colonial 
extension. It would mean the subversion of ancient 
kingdoms, the demoralisation of primitive societies, 
the extermination of unoffending races. If the great 
national shame and danger, which it behoves every 
patriotic Englishman to avert, be, as I solemnly be- 
lieve it to be, the growth of mercantile injustice in 



ENGLAND AND FEANCE. 125 

our empire, this shame and danger would be largely- 
increased, were England to gain at once an enormous 
increase of power and a stimulus to her material lusts. 
America thus would add to her impunity whilst en- 
couraging her vices. Valuable as Anglo- Saxonism 
is as part of a wider system of political combinations, 
to substitute it by itself for such a system would be 
the surest road to national decline. 

By this method of logical exhaustion we come 
back, therefore, to the only possible and rational basis 
of English policy, a close understanding with France. 
It is easy to see how natural and solid such a policy 
is — paramount in its advantages not in one respect, 
but in all respects. In the first place, whilst it is 
most true that the Western Powers form a system of 
themselves, it has been shown to be no less obvious 
that there is in this system a certain dualism, and that 
of this dualism France and England are the foremost 
representatives. As far the most powerful of the 
European nations, as far the most advanced, as far 
the most stable, these two nations form, for the mo- 
ment, an order by themselves. However desirable 
it may be that the state system, which is even now 
morally one, should become politically one or legally 
consolidated, it would be Utopian to expect common 
European action, or even standing European coun- 
cils or congresses, for many a generation. In the 
mean time a settled understanding and a healthy co- 
operation between England and France is possible, 
and may well represent and do duty for the other. 
Nor is this simply a vision of the future. When the 
two Western Powers allied themselves to defend Con- 
stantinople and Eastern Europe from the Tartar, in 
spite of the indecision and incompleteness of their 



126 ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 

action, in spite of the selfish aims and the petty in- 
trigues from which neither was free, in spite of the 
opposition of bewildered Germany — it was felt that 
the Crimean war was an undertaking in the name and 
interest of Europe, which could only be closed by a 
European conference, and which opened a nevf Euro- 
pean epoch. Secondly, the extreme diversity of 
England and France enables them together fairly to 
represent and to harmonise the principal elements of 
European society. In the next place, their interests 
are so far different, and yet so far from antagonistic, 
that any common course which they take cannot be 
far from the interests of the rest of Europe. France 
can never abet England to establish a tyranny outside 
of Europe ; nor could England abet France in esta- 
blishing one mthm it. 

Now what is here meant is not an alliance with 
France, or a friendliness towards France, much less 
flattery of the actual rulers of France, — rather a 
well-considered agreement with the French nation 
upon the main features of their joint policy. It 
would be quite possible for the directors of the two 
nations, if at all worthy of the name, to lay down 
broad paths of action on all the chief European 
questions, which should duly satisfy the interests of 
both, strengthen the moral and the material position 
of both, and yet awaken none of the jealousies of 
their neighbours. It need scarcely be said that such 
an agreement, prepared as a whole and honestly 
proclaimed, could not possibly comprise schemes pre- 
judicial to the other Powers, or referring exclusively 
to the selfish interests of either. Neither could have 
the smallest mterest to assist the other in aggression, 
spoliation, or tyranny. Nor could they agree for 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 127 

mutual aid to such ends; for each would feel even 
more indignation in such a scheme in the other than 
it would feel satisfaction in being permitted such a 
scheme itself. The various projects of national 
aggrandisement justly and unjustly attributed to 
France would one and all be distinctly repudiated 
and provided against. England on her part must 
surrender and disclaim the actual or the imputed 
wrongs against the rights of her neighbours with 
which she is charged, — be it Gibraltar, be it Malta, 
be it the empire of the seas or imperial arrogance. 
It would be easy for both nations to give up these 
objects of vulgar ambition or irrational pride in ex- 
change for greater and more lasting objects of na- 
tional glory. That in this stage of civilisation they 
still disturb the ideas and the acts of two great 
nations is due chiefly to the utter state of disorgani- 
sation to which the European state system is reduced, 
and to the rebuffs which the better hopes and efforts 
of each so contmually meet from the other. The 
failure of these is due, however, mainly to this, that 
England and France are constantly engaged in carry- 
ing out a policy without the aid of, occasionally in 
spite of the opposition of, the other. 

The great fact of a permanent alliance between 
England and France, when once distinctly pro- 
claimed, would alone suffice to achieve or prepare 
most of its happiest results. So soon as it was really 
understood throughout Europe that England and 
France had definitely concluded a comprehensive 
agreement on all the greater questions of pohcy, 
formally renouncing or abandoning all pretensions 
odious or menacing to other states, publicly engagmg 
to use their vast resources and their legitimate influ- 



128 ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 

ence in concert for the general settlement of the state 
system in the cause equally of order and progress, 
many of the principal perplexities of the Continent 
would be in a fair way towards solution at once. 
The preposterous projects with which desperate re- 
actionists and revolutionists in turn trouble the har- 
mony of the West would be little heard of when all 
were aware of a settled determination on the part of 
the two great heads of Europe that she should be 
delivered over neither to oppression nor to anarchy, 
but that the gradual resettlement of states into a new 
and completer system of liberty should be carried 
on without recoil and without confusion. Kussia, 
who has so long traded on the jealousies and in- 
trigues of the West, ".vould at last abandon her long 
dream of aggression upon Europe. Austria would 
reconcile herself to treat for Yenetia, and prepare 
herself for her transformed existence. Prussia, that 
mock Kussia of North Germany, would see that no 
fresh divisions would enable her to pursue unchecked 
her tortuous and arrogant career. Italy would at 
once feel absolutely guaranteed against the pressure 
of her friends or the aggressions of her enemies, and 
would turn to national restoration, reheved from the 
intrigues which are due to the one, and the military 
incubus which is caused by the other. Spain would 
recover her pride, develop her enormous resources, 
without the necessity of courting the rulers of France, 
of flouting those of England, and of tyrannising over 
petty outlying nations. The smaller nations one and 
all might look for a real insurance against oppression, 
and might learn to trust to opinion instead of to in- 
trigue. The partisans of the old system, their cause 
visibly lost, would learn resignation. The partisans 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 129 

of the new, their cause taken out of their hands, 
would learn patience. Peace, trade, and civilisation 
would gain, not by commercial treaties, but by a 
healthier political atmosphere. Who shall gainsay 
that such results do not incomparably transcend the 
vulgar and shifting objects of ambition which each 
Power in its isolation now alternately pursues ? 

V. 

It will be asked, and it may possibly be reason- 
able, that such a scheme as is here suggested should 
be reduced to a practical form and be illustrated by 
actual examples. Such a demand is not unfair ; but 
it is somewhat difficult to meet. To satisfy it would 
be to give a comprehensive sketch of European po- 
litics, — a subject obviously beyond the scope of this 
essay. To state, on the other hand, a set of political 
doctrines without much explanation is to leave them 
liable to wide misconception and needless criticism. 
This, however, must be met ; and we proceed to give 
the heads of such broad objects of policy as carry 
out the theory we advocate. In the first place, there 
is one indispensable condition to any healthy union 
between the two nations. That Europe may cease to 
regard with alarm the consolidation of so vast a power 
as that of the combined weight of the two nations 
thoroughly in earnest and thoroughly at one, both 
must give the clearest guarantees that this power 
would never be exerted to the detriment of the other 
Powers; both must for ever retire from those posi- 
tions in which either wounds or menaces its neigh- 
bours. It must at once be seen that this involves 
on the part of England the immediate and uncondi- 

K 



130 ENGLAND AND FEANCE. 

tional surrender of Gibraltar, which so soon as Italy- 
is free will be far the worst and most intolerable 
outrage on national rights in Western Europe. This 
great act of justice is in truth the very condition of 
any right action of England in Europe, and cannot 
be accomplished too soon, too thoroughly, or too 
freely. As a consequence, and as various circum- 
stances may need, will follow the withdrawal from 
the exclusive occupation of Malta and disbanding of 
our large Mediterranean fleet at such time and under 
such conditions as the true interests of Europe shall 
determine. On the part of France it involves the 
clearest renunciation of the Ehine as a frontier (an 
attempt upon which should be clearly recognised by 
her neighbours as a casus belli) ^ the distinctest pledge 
to recognise the independence of the Belgian people, 
and withdrawal from any attempts to dictate to or 
to encroach upon Italy. As an earnest that both 
these professions are sincere, there is due from France 
a real reduction of her armies, and (should its in- 
habitants not desire permanent incorporation) the 
cession of the territory of Nice, the wanton absorp- 
tion of which is so great a stigma on the people and 
sovereign of France. These great sacrifices to public 
duty once made, with their material resources un- 
impaired and their moral force redoubled, the two 
Powers would be in a position to carry out a common 
policy without exciting the jealousies of Europe. 

The first conditions of that policy must be finally 
to secure the West of Europe from all disturbing in- 
fluences from the East. Morally and even materially 
the tranquillity of Turkey, of Austria, of Prussia, and 
of Scandinavia, is continually troubled by the action 
of their gigantic Eastern neighbour. It cannot be 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 131 

too fully recognised tliat Russia is a Power wtually 
extra-European and semi- Oriental, having a wholly 
different orbit, and belonging to a distinctly lower 
grade of civilisation than that of the States of Wes- 
tern Europe. Her influence over them is injurious; 
her further encroachment on them would be oppres- 
sive. Only fanatics or pedants can see any good to 
accrue to Europe or to the subject races by the 
substitution of the Tartar for the Turk in Constanti- 
nople. The southern extension of Russia, once begun, 
would not end until it had absorbed the Danubian, 
Albanian, and Greek races, and, enveloping Hungary 
in one vast fold, had stretched from the base of the 
Baltic to the head of the Adriatic. It would be to 
subject to her races with whom she has no real sym- 
pathy, and many of whom are far her superiors in 
cultivation ; and, in the case of the Greeks and the 
Turks at least, would result in a new Poland of the 
South. Poland herself, it must not be forgotten, is 
morally, politically, and socially a true part of the 
European, and not a part of the Russian system. 
Her case, cruelly complicated by questions of races 
and classes, is beyond doubt the most difficult mth 
which Europe has yet to deal, and must be considered 
presently by itself. Suffice it here to say, that for 
the advanced nations of the West to forget or decry 
their sufferins; sister would be as shameful as it would 
be weak. Every effort must be persistently made to 
mitigate, if not at once to terminate the terrible doom 
she endures. At the same time, to attempt to relieve 
her instantly by force of arms would be to open a vast 
conflict of nations, and to inaugurate the hoideverse- 
ment of European order. Far be it from us to ven- 
ture on so desperate and dubious a remedy. The 



132 ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 

case is not so clear ; tlie necessity is not so pressing ; 
the gain is not so vast ; the agents are not so blame- 
less as to justify a sacrifice so great. It remains to be 
seen if the whole moral weight of Europe may not 
yet suffice to secure for Poland, as it has for Hungary, 
some issue by which her civilisation may have free 
life and liberty, without a deadly struggle of nation- 
alities or an era of frantic commotion. Wisely and 
boldly used, the moral force of England and France 
combined is amply sufficient to secure at once a fu- 
ture for Poland, and to guarantee Europe from fur- 
ther aggression; for, in face of the pregnant results 
of the Crimean war, Eussia knows, as all Europe 
knows, that their material force is able, if need be, 
alone to protect Europe from aggression and to hum- 
ble the aggressor in the dust. 

As part of this policy, or as its complement, comes 
the entangled and shifting problem of the south-east- 
ern section of Europe. Complicated as it is by a net- 
work of difficulties of religion, race, and class, it is 
peculiarly one for the practical genius of the born 
statesman. The working out of these vexed ques- 
tions belongs exclusively to the man of action, and 
not to the man of theory. Thus much, perhaps, of 
general policy a mere onlooker can sketch out. In 
the absence of all proof of the fitness of any of the 
races within the Turkish Empire to supply its place, 
it may well be assumed that reasonable policy would 
lead the Western Powers to do nothing to weaken 
the throne of the Sultan. That, in spite of his vices 
and defects, the Turk still holds together without 
actual anarchy the discordant religions and races 
of his empire, we know. We know not what might 
be the issue were his task to fall to any of these 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 133 

half-civilised and restless races whom he rules, or 
were they left to work out their own internecine 
feuds. The various schemes for the resettlement of 
Eastern Europe all savour of the pedant, the par- 
tisan, or the bigot. What will be acknowledged is 
that the great preponderance of practical politicians 
and of observers on the spot are favourable to the 
mamtenance for a time, and under some conditions, 
of the Turkish rule. 

To abstain from promoting an era of confusion is 
one thing ; it is quite another thing to become a par- 
ticipator in the misrule of the Moslem, and, as some 
recent statesmen have done, hold him in leading- 
strings to educate him in tyranny. It yet remains 
to be seen if a simpler course will not prove better. 
As fulfilling for the time a useful function in pre- 
serving some order over the balanced races of the 
empire, the Turk may fairly claim and receive pro- 
tection from other Powers. To abet him in riveting 
the chains or increasing the miseries of his own sub- 
jects, would be as monstrous on the Danube as it 
would be on the Po. To interfere actively, on the 
other hand, in the internal administration of the Sul- 
tan, or to constitute ourselves the reformers of his 
monarchy and protectors of any class of his subjects, 
is to assume the responsibility of the whole system of 
misrule, whilst increasing its confusion. Hitherto the 
action of the Western Powers has been employed to 
hamper the sovereign of Turkey with impossible and 
contradictory conditions, to degrade him in the eyes 
of his Moslem and Christian subjects. They have 
almost invariably been at cross purposes with each 
other. The self-styled protectors of Turkey have 
usually had some miserable game of their own in the 



134 ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 

background. Where they have striven honestly to 
aid her, they have been striving yet more actively to 
preserve her from the aid of others. The history of 
the Western Powers in Turkey is the history not of 
friends combining to defend a friend, but of rivals 
struggling over a prize. From the ambassador (the 
Byzantine Mayor of the Palace) down to the ob- 
scurest consul of the Levant, the Western Powers 
have fought a long and varying battle for influence, 
like quacks plotting against each other round the sick 
man's bed of death. Each effort of the Porte to raise 
itself is the result and the beginning of a new diplo- 
matic campaign. The true solution of the Turkish 
question is the simple one — to leave the empire to 
itself; to leave the various races to work out their 
own future ; to extend a friendly hand to the Turk, 
as the lawful ruler de facto ^ as possibly the only one 
yet capable of rule ; not pretending to administer or 
to reform the empire, but to guarantee it from wan- 
ton destruction at the hands of any other European 
Power. 

Order once rendered permanent and defence tho- 
roughly guaranteed to Europe along her Eastern por- 
tion, the internal questions will simplify themselves 
with new ease when free from the perturbing influ- 
ence of these lower civilisations. The grand function 
of the two leading Powers would naturally be to 
preserve Europe from general convulsion without re- 
pressing the evolution of the new system into which 
she is being transformed ; a task doubtless of singu- 
lar delicacy and difficulty, and one in which tentative 
and moderate measures alone at present can avail. 
The time may come when Europe, organised into 
a vigorous state system and animated by common 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 135 

moral principles, may feel herself strong and enlight- 
ened enough to deal mth these international ques- 
tions on a grand scale and with a vigorous confidence ; 
but it would be Utopian to expect that the union 
of the two leaders (at best but the forerunner and 
symbol of this system) can on a very large scale 
solve these problems directly or authoritatively. In 
spite of the temptation to interference produced by 
alternate injustice and confusion, the more far-sighted 
course is patience ; and candid and thoughtful minds 
at length are brought to admit that the complica- 
tions of Europe are too great ; that the future course 
is in its details too obscure; that the traditions and 
the motives of both nations are far too mixed for 
them to constitute themselves in any active sense the 
arbiters and reformers of Europe. The vague appeals 
to the magnanimity of England and the mission of 
France, in which unpractical enthusiasts on both 
sides of the Channel indulge, deserve much of the 
contempt they receive from practical politicians. In 
truth, they would generally, if admitted, lead to far 
more harm than good; for they call on two Powers 
to do that which neither their material force nor 
their moral standard justifies them in attempting. 
This language applies and is meant to apply to the 
case of Italy, — the only remaining instance of na- 
tional oppression within the pale of Western Europe 
at once gross and clear. Monstrous as is the occu- 
pation of Venetia by Austria, it is far from plain that 
it would be wise in England and France to wrest it 
from her by sheer force. Whilst the moral, political, 
and material injuries which such a war would cause 
are obvious (for to attack Austria thus would be to 
attack Germany, probably sustained by Russia), the 



136 ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 

prospect of some other solution of the difficulty than 
that of war is continually improving. That only is 
right for nations to undertake which they can pru- 
dently expect to accomplish with no disproportionate 
waste or risk. In spite of the delight which every 
friend of progress and freedom must feel in the regene- 
ration of Italy — the great moral as well as the chief 
political event of this nineteenth century — it is impos- 
sible not to doubt that the danger of European con- 
vulsion, the sinister passions, and the doubtful glory 
which have resulted from French intervention have 
made it a precedent not readily to be imitated. If 
for both the Powers to interfere together be question- 
able, for one alone to do so is disastrous. England 
from her position could not without unusual efforts 
rescue or even defend Italy from Germany (and it is 
Germany, not Austria, which is her real oppressor) ; 
and France, yet fresh from the peace of Yillafranca, 
the occupation of Rome, and the seizure of Nice, 
could not intervene with good grace. But if the 
two Powers would not be wise to wrest Venice from 
Austria at the price of a possible convulsion in 
Europe, there remains yet a great duty for them 
towards Italy. 

They have the clearest right to prevent any fresh 
encroachment by the Teuton, and to guarantee yet 
to Italy all that she has hitherto acquired. It would 
be much towards the settlement of the great Italian 
question if the two great Powers, whilst renouncing 
all designs of forcible aggression on Austria, could 
make Italy absolutely secure against all invasion 
from without. Nor would their moral influence be 
small. None can reasonably doubt that, if the m- 
fluence of England and France were once honestly 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 137 

combined to help Italy, and to undo some portion 
of the wrong which for three centuries Europe has 
piled on her, the greatest results would follow. If so 
much has been accomplished whilst they were neu- 
tralismg each other's action by jealous rivalries, until 
it seemed, like another Turkey, to be the battle-field 
of diplomacy, what might not be hoped for from that 
influence thoroughly exerted in unison? Those who 
would think lightly of what moral weight can efi*ect 
in a case like that of Italy should consider how much 
she has received from the purely moral aid of England. 
But in estimating this, the finest recent example of 
the appeal to opinion, it will be wise to remember 
the extent to which it has been modified and stimu- 
lated by fear or jealousy of France. It is of incal- 
culable importance to Europe, and it is the plainest 
interest both of England and France, that Italy 
should be constituted independent and free without 
being forced to become a great military power. The 
restoration of Italy to her o^vn place amongst the 
first nations of Europe, without the sinister glory of 
bloody victories, would be a result which would at 
once disarm the jealousy of her neighbours and be 
her own true welfare. 

If the case of Italy be not strong enough to jus- 
tify a crusade on her behalf — a case in which every 
thing combines to make oppression intolerable — 
there is certamly no case of oppression in Western 
Europe which can justify intervention by arms. 
Every one who watches the condition of Europe 
must feel how beset it is with danger, how unstable 
is that equilibrium for which such sacrifices have 
been made. Xor is it simply that there are a mul- 
titude of smouldering disputes which at any moment 



138 ENGLAND AND PEANCE. 

may break into a flame. These disputes, however 
insignificant in themselves, are in some way con- 
nected with each other. And the real danger is, 
that any one of these questions may lead to a gene- 
ral convulsion. Poland, the fatal state -prisoner of 
three monarchies, can neither stir nor groan without 
sending a shudder through Europe. Each petty 
quarrel m Germany seems the prelude of a grand 
Teutonic struggle. A speech from the French throne, 
a movement of the Parisian workmen, vibrates for 
good or for evil through the West. Now on the 
Eider, now on the Meuse, now on the Mincio, now 
on the Danube, men watch for the outburst of 
that subterranean storm which all feel moving be- 
neath them. Neither diplomacy nor bayonets can 
suppress it. It is there because for the first time 
Europe is shaken by international and social ques- 
tions working at once. It is because all the old 
bases of order, mediasval or modern, religious, legal, 
and diplomatic, are undermined ; and the balance 
of power, treaties, hereditary rights, and military 
authority have all gone the way of popes, barons, 
and emperors. Europe, in a word, may at any mo- 
ment be thrown into general convulsion, because 
each part of it is passing through vast changes, and 
no recognised basis of union exists. Europe is in- 
deed in mid-revolution — a revolution at once reli- 
gious, intellectual, political, and social. No one but 
a revolutionist of unusual recklessness will venture 
to assert that this revolution can best be accom- 
plished by an era of general disorder. A few fana- 
tics may still think that the new system wiU issue 
from the furnace with renewed vitality and in per- 
fect health, and be wiUing to plmige us into a melee 



ENGLAND AND FKANCE. 139 

of war or a triumph of anarcliy, in the confidence 
that civiHsation, freedom, peace, and justice will 
prove the inevitable issue. This is neither history, 
policy, nor reason. If there is one duty of Euro- 
pean statesmen plainer than another, it is to avoid 
this era, of which no man can tell the issue, whilst 
recognising, welcoming, and aiding the movement 
which is the deepest cause of this crisis. The Revo- 
lution in France was cruelly blighted by foreign war. 
That of Europe would be so in no less degree by 
an era of general confusion. It must be a very de- 
termmed partisan of revolutions that will venture 
to assert that the new state of things is sufficiently 
matured, the public mind sufficiently prepared, and 
any set of principles sufficiently accepted, to give them 
a prospect of assuming the direction of affairs with 
complete regularity and on a totally new basis. 

There would be a system, however, almost worse 
than that of encouraging anarchy, and that would 
be a system of repressing movement. The first con- 
dition of all right action in Europe is to recognise 
it as in a state of transition, and to welcome the 
change that is inevitable. The state-map of Europe 
must be thoroughly recast. Questions of race, of 
nationality, of class^ — questions in which two of these 
or all three are intermixed, meet us at every turn. 
Broadly speaking, there is the Scandinavian pro- 
blem, the German problem, the Magyar problem, 
the Slavonian problem, the Italian problem ; not to 
speak of the Polish problem proper, or the Irish 
problem. It is the fashion to smile at these theories 
as phrases, and to ask what they mean in reality. 
They mean simply this — that the existing divisions 
and relations of states is now become profoundly at 



140 ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 

variance with the interests and wishes of their in- 
habitants, and that they are daily growing more 
and more divergent. It means that the men of 
Schleswig-Holstein are not and cannot remain satis- 
fied with their existing condition, in spite of the 
bombast of Germans and the rapacity of Prussia ; 
that the absurd and noxious princelets of Germany 
must be abohshed, and Germany reconstituted in 
accordance with her national wants and mshes ; 
that the relations of the Magyar, the German, and 
the Slavonians in the Austrian Empire must be har- 
monised, and all rendered friendly by each becom- 
ing independent ; a process in the course of which 
the Austrian Empire as we know it (which has long 
been not a monarchy but a military bureau) will 
utterly disappear. It means that Italy must become 
a nation, not only perfectly free from the Alps to 
Cape Passaro, but beyond the suggestion of dicta- 
tion or insult. Spain, it is well known, will face any 
sacrifice and perhaps any crime to bring about a 
complication by which she might redress the stand- 
ing outrage of Gibraltar. 'Nov are the relations of 
Portugal with Spain wholly without risk of national 
collision. If the case of Ireland is ceasing to be a 
national problem, it is because it has now almost 
passed into a social problem ; but it is not the 
less formidable thus. Chronic disaffection and occa- 
sional rebellion still seems to English politicians 
and writers a mere subject for ridicule. But in 
estimating the position of England in Europe, it is 
impossible to overlook the fact that her moral influ- 
ence is seriously weakened by the standing sore of 
her Irish difficulty. Nor is France, which withholds 
from Italy her capital and the birthplace of her 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 141 

greatest living hero, at all more free frora ominous 
questions. In a word, there is no country on the 
Continent of Europe in which the violation of the 
rights, power, and interests of the people by neigh- 
bours may not at any moment lead to a violent ex- 
plosion, or any one in which such explosion might 
not lead to universal European embroilment. 

The first duty of the leaders of Western civilisa- 
tion is to recognise this state of things; their second 
is to do their best to develop the movement which 
causes it without violent rupture. It is obvious that 
this is especially a case in which the instinct of the 
practical statesman must be his own guide. It would 
be pedantry in any theorist to attempt to work it out 
in its details. Generally speaking, the policy needed 
is one which, actively resisting all further encroach- 
ments on national rights and all violent attempts to 
suppress the growth of the new order, should support 
the status quo where it did not appear intolerably cor- 
rupt and openly retrograde. It would thus be right to 
protect the smaller states from the aggression of the 
stronger; and Denmark, Scandinavia, Belgium, Hol- 
land, and Switzerland would be guaranteed, like Italy, 
against wanton invasion. It would not, however, be 
right to interfere in the internal movements of any 
state, to make a local struggle general, or to foster 
any of the greater series of changes. It has thus no 
right to promote actively the resettlement of Ger- 
many, the dissolution of the Austrian or the Turkish 
Empire, or the recomposition of Prussia. Till a sound 
and final scheme for each of these great tasks has 
fairly taken hold of the races concerned, it would be 
right to recognise and respect the existing condition 
as at least conducive to order. 



142 ENGLAND AND FEANCE. 

Language like this must sound cold or cruel to 
the ardent advocates of national rights. They believe 
with bliad faith that, the banner of the people once 
raised, Europe would fall into a just and easy reset- 
tlement. It should suffice, however, to reflect that no 
one of the schemes of nationalities (not even that of 
the noble protomartyr of the national cause, Joseph 
Mazzini) does any thing to secure the conservative 
element, international justice, and organic harmony. 

The theory of nationalities, unless it forms part of 
and is thoroughly subordinated to a comprehensive 
system of political resettlement in all its phases, based 
upon a complete social philosophy, is a cause of dis- 
turbance and even of antagonism. The wrongs which 
France does to Italy are the wrongs done by the 
French people — wrongs from which the democratic 
and national party are not clear. They are still more 
implicated in the national projects on the Rhine. It 
was German patriots who clamoured for and over the 
spoliation of Denmark. It is Prussian professors 
who are the bitterest detractors of Italy. The liberal 
party in England are as keen as the rest in defence of 
Gibraltar. The Magyar has been a cold friend to 
Italy, and a hard neighbour to the Croat. Hungarian, 
Pole, and Slavonian are in turn accusers and accused. 
It is a dream that nations will be incapable of. op- 
pressing when they themselves have ceased to be 
oppressed. 

The case of Poland is as strong an example as 
could be found of all of these conditions at once. As 
a problem of special intricacy, it requires a separate 
study. It is at once the most flagrant case of na- 
tional oppression and the most striking example of 
the difficulties of applying a remedy. Nothing can 



ENGLAND AND FKANCE. 143 

be more shocking than the humiliation of Poland; 
nothing can make the case stronger for intervention 
by the West to rescue their brethren from Muscovite 
semi-barbarism. On the other hand, the question is 
embittered by intricate hatreds of race and class ; and 
nothing can be plainer than that intervention would 
lead to a vast European conflagration. What, then, is 
the issue from a dilemma apparently so hopeless — an 
equal duty, it would seem, to intervene and to ab- 
stain from intervening? Not assuredly the cynical 
selfishness of the money-market; not the querulous 
apathy of the effete poHticians; not the bombast, 
the jealousy, and the practical treachery which has 
marked our recent political action as a nation, — 
threatenino^ Eussia and lecturinoc Poland, aocitatmo; 
Europe whilst quarrelling with France, fanning a re- 
volution and then reviling it; and throughout these 
vaunts, protests, and insults, accomplishing nothing 
but the wishes of the money-dealers. 

What then must be done ? Nothing is more plain 
than that the Polish question is one which especially 
concerns Europe as a whole, and can be effectually 
solved only by Europe as a whole. The intervention 
of one Power alone, or even of two Powers, it has 
been seen repeatedly, instantly inflames the antago- 
nism, and sets Europe in a general turmoil. The 
business of the leaders of Europe is to organise the 
common desire and the public opinion of the various 
states, and to bring it to bear with an overwhelming 
moral demonstration against Eussia, which might 
very well go the length of excommunicatuig her 
from the politics of the West. Even then it would 
be sanguine to expect any immediate relief to Poland. 
Eussia, it need not be said, would hardly yield up 



144 ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 

her prey to any moral force in the world. But the 
time has been (emphatically at the Congress of Vienna, 
again in 1832, and still more distinctly during the 
Crimean war, or rather at its close) when Europe 
united was in a position to have wrung from Eussia 
at least a partial liberation of Poland, without dis- 
proportionate efforts. Such a time will come again; 
and each opportunity lost makes the end harder to 
attain. More particularly it would be rendered easy 
if the form of that intervention aims rather at gua- 
ranteeing^ to Poland a free national existence, short of 
violent disruption from the Muscovite crown. The 
treaties of Vienna do actually secure to Poland a large 
measure of national life and independence. Had they 
been ever acted upon, had the states not been ab- 
sorbed in their own reactionary schemes, the Polish 
question could not have become what it has. In the 
mean time the European states have a perfect right 
and a clear duty to insist on at least the fulfilment of 
this pledge. It is hard to believe that statesmanship 
worthy of the name, resolutely and persistently bend- 
ing to this end the united will of Europe, could not 
in the long-run succeed. And if it did succeed, the 
name of Poland would cease to be the terror and the 
stigma of Europe. 

This brings us directly to the question which ob- 
viously underlies any theory of foreign policy — the 
question, namely, of war. Is war, and if so, when, a 
legitimate means of national policy? Now, in the 
philosophy on which this volume is based, war is the 
direct antithesis of modern civilisation, the negation 
of industrialism, the type of all that is hostile to hu- 
man progress. To all the religious horror of war felt 
by the devout; to all the repugnance it inspires in 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 145 

the popular politician; to all the logical condemna- 
tion which is heaped on it by the theoretic economist, 
— the positive system of belief, over and above all 
these, stamps it with the ban of history as the em- 
bodiment of all that civilised man has yet to cast off. 
Assuredly it would be hard to charge indifference to 
its evils on a system in which war stands often as a 
sort of symbol of evil. 

Yet that system, true to its relative character, 
has never adopted the honourable fanaticism of the 
Peace apostles. Impatient of Utopias, it has gone 
no further than to hope that war may be reduced to 
a minimum. It is -willing to allow that war may 
never be absolutely eradicated from mankind; that 
there may come times when there are things even 
worse than war. To save a valuable element of the 
race from annihilation; to preserve a living organ 
of our civilisation from destruction ; to remove a 
cancer from political society, may yet become a just 
cause of war. But this responsibility — the greatest 
perhaps which a nation or a public counsellor can 
assume — must be defined by most stringent condi- 
tions. It must be a war in which all the sacrifices, 
and none of the gains, fall to the authors ; it must 
be a war strictly defensive — to defend not a wrong, 
but a right ; to rescue some weak victim from a 
manifest oppressor. It must be a war undertaken, 
if possible, with the cooperation of others ; or if not 
with their actual aid, at least with the hearty moral 
support of the preponderant Power of the West. It 
must be a war of which the necessity is ine^i-table, 
the issue certain, and the good results immensely 
preponderating. It must be a war, lastly, waged with 
every precaution to diminish race-hatreds, with every 

L 



146 ENGLAND AND FEANCE. 

alleviation which war can allow to the innocent, with 
every relief which can be devised to neutrals ; and es- 
pecially a war made by absolutely pure hands, with- 
out a suspicion to rest on the motives of its authors. 
War such as this is not war in its old sense, but an 
act of police ; it is, but on a larger scale, the arrest 
of a combination of criminals, or the suppression of a 
band of organised rioters. In a system which has no 
superstitious regard for mere life, and no slavish re- 
spect for mere wealth, but which considers only the 
social welfare in its highest aspect, war may yet be- 
coiRQ a terrible necessity ; but it will be war deprived 
of half its evils. And little doubt will exist that, 
were all these conditions imperatively fulfilled, war 
would be practically extinct. It would be a grave 
case, indeed, which would force a nation to undertake 
a duty so unprofitable, so burdensome, so responsible. 
By a very large party in England — perhaps to 
nearly all the best of our politicians — the proposal 
which these pages contain for a permanent union with 
France will be indignantly rejected as implying a 
friendship or alliance with its present ruler. Sharing 
much of the repugnance which they feel for the violent 
origin and the tyrannical ambition of the second Em- 
pire, I do not share that rooted hostility to Louis 
Napoleon which marks the pure revolutionary school. 
To me he is — though abler than most of them — 
neither much better nor much worse than the other 
governors who for a time have directed France in the 
spasms of her long revolutionary labour. He is, as 
many of them have been, but the expression of the 
craving of the great mass of Frenchmen for an era of 
order which shall not be a return to the past. Ac- 
tively accepted by a vast majority as a guarantee of 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 147 

material prosperity ; simply acquiscecl in by the work- 
men as neutral in the o'reat social struo^o;le between 
labour and capital; grudgingly admitted by the pride 
and heart of liberal France as partly satisfying from 
time to time her mission and her wants, — Louis Na- 
poleon remains, in spite of the massacres, in spite of 
military tyranny, in spite of his dangerous ambition, 
in spite of his dynastic folHes and extravagances, the 
nearest approach to the revolutionary statesman which 
France has had since Danton. Declamation may make 
any thing of politics ; but a true judgment of public 
men is always a balance of opposite qualities, and 
never so much so as in judging the most mixed of 
all modern characters in the most complicated of all 
modern situations. Whilst there are none of the 
parties of movement which do not from time to time 
expect and receive from him some act in their be- 
half, the only parties to whom he is mvincibly odious 
are royalists, bigots, and litterateurs. He has saved 
France at least from Bourbonism, from Ultramon- 
tanism, from a reign of eloquent pedants and cor- 
rupt journalists. The praters and dreamers who call 
themselves the intellect of France are indeed ex- 
tinguished, but by contempt rather than by force. 
They can still indulge their literary vanity and their 
love of wordy theories in the safe repose of their 
academies; but they no longer can indulge them at 
the expense of a great nation. Holding it as an 
unmixed gain that the theorists and critics of France 
are relegated from the Parliament back to their 
desks; judging his whole course, his whole policy, 
his whole influence at once; estimating his foes and 
his friends, his position, opportunities, and tempta- 
tions fairly ; the various elements of the French na- 



148 ENGLAND AND TRANCE. 

tion and its antagonistic ideas, the previous govern- 
ments of France, and, above all, the anarchical di- 
lemma out of which the Empire arose, — I feel con- 
strained to count the present Napoleon as belonging 
on the whole to the great cause of movement in 
France and in the West — as being at least the actual 
choice of France ; as one who, whilst bent on closing 
at any cost the era of political chaos, is yet a real 
but unworthy leader of the great cause of revolu- 
tionary progress. 

But in truth it is to my mind not a question 
of the character of Napoleon or any particular ruler 
of France. The union of England and France must 
be a combination of the policy of the two nations, 
and not of the schemes of their respective rulers. It 
is a permanent alliance between two peoples, which 
need suffer no interruption by temporary changes 
of governments. Napoleon is, as I believe, in the 
long - run as completely responsible to the public 
opinion of France as any English government what- 
ever. He can, and in rare cases (of which Mexico 
is a flagrant case) he does act on his own responsi- 
bility for a time ; but no grand scheme of policy can 
be attempted, and no scheme can be long persevered 
in, against the determined opposition of France. For 
the most part Napoleon watches the course of this 
opinion mth even more anxious care than an English 
minister ; for he resists it at the cost, not of parlia- 
mentary defeat, but of a dynastic catastrophe. The 
policy of Napoleon therefore is strong or formidable 
only when it is the policy also of the French nation ; 
and when it is this it is a national and not a personal 
policy. 

Nothing in fact would be easier than to cooperate 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 149 

with the solid interests of France as a nation, and 
not with the accidental aims of her statesmen. The 
very first condition of the policy advocated here would 
at once secure such an end. The union of France 
and England must rest on no secret treaty or cabinet 
agreement. It must be a full programme of general 
policy, proclaimed to all the world, and looking for 
its chief support to the conviction that it is avowed 
and unchangeable. The mere publication of a deli- 
berate scheme of action will reduce the selfish pro- 
jects of either nation to manifest contradiction and 
absurdity. By the terms of such a scheme the vari- 
ous ends of dangerous ambition must be disavowed. 
To revive them would be at once a breach of a pub- 
lic compact, the negation of an avowed duty, and a 
surrender of national good faith. It is, indeed, ex- 
travagant to suppose that such a union would imply 
any readiness on the part of either Power to abet 
the sinister designs of the other ; when the very 
essence of that union was a formal repudiation of 
every one of them, and a solemn undertakmg to 
regard any similar attempt as a case for joint resist- 
ance by the commonwealth of nations. Napoleonism 
would be extinct, and Napoleon would remain but 
the chief of the French Kepublic. Nor could he 
or any responsible ruler of France reject such an 
ofi'er from England publicly and seriously proposed 
for acceptance to the French nation. The recogni- 
tion of the real ends of the great movement of which 
the centre is France, an active desire to forward that 
movement in every safe and reasonable way, must 
always command the adhesion of the true force of 
French opinion. "Europe is at rest when France 
is satisfied," it has been said with much insolence 



150 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 



and some truth. The truest guarantee of peace and 
order in Europe would be that France could feel that 
in every legitimate desire to promote the new era 
she had the moral and material support of England. 
But this, and nothing less than this, is the price of 
any policy of alliance with France, and indeed of any 
reasonable policy at all. 

Such is a brief sketch of the scheme of pohcy 
which the system of life and society on which this 
book is based suggests for practical application at 
the hands of actual statesmen. It will be thought 
by some a scheme extravagant in its revolutionary 
tendencies ; by others weak from its want of novelty 
or vigour. One word to each of these. It is the 
first element of right judgment to recognise not 
in the political sphere alone, but in the intellectual, 
the social, and the material, the enormous extent 
of the movement which pervades them all. An 
age which admits it yet fully only in the material 
side (as if this era were simply the age of steam, or 
the age of machinery), and fails to see the transfor- 
mation of ideas, of social, national, and moral systems 
around us, will be terrified at the full adoption of 
political revolution. But politics, like philosophy, will 
remain a Ba,bel of discordant cries, a prey to rival 
adventurers, until this is recognised and avowed. 
How much less perturbing, how much less reckless, 
how much more conservative in its only healthy 
sense is a policy which welcomes and promotes an 
inevitable revolution, but insists that it shall be car- 
ried out under conditions of order ! 

A word again to those to whom the scheme is 
neither new nor energetic. That it is not new is a 
merit. Politics are not ingenious games. The social 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 151 

condition of Europe is not to be righted by clever 
manoeuvres or surprising discoveries. Nothing, it 
may be said broadly, in politics is true or right that 
has not already possession of the public mind. It 
would be the aim of the system we advocate to in- 
troduce as little rupture with the past as possible, to 
utilise all the traditions and habits of nations that 
can possibly be turned to good account. If the policy 
here sketched consists of nothmg but schemes, each 
one of which is more or less, has been at one time or 
other, or promises to be sooner or later, the tendency 
of English politicians, that is precisely what has been 
desired. To do systematically what has long been 
done empirically ; to work out consciously the pro- 
blems which have spontaneously arisen ; to coordmate 
a variety of isolated tendencies into an organic plan ; 
to elevate the great traditions of the past into the 
realisation of the highest duty of the present and 
ultimate culmination in the best, — such is precisely 
the course of history and human society, and it is as 
true in politics as it is in morals or in thought. 

The objection that the policy is wanting in energy 
need trouble us little. The only fear need be that it 
is a policy so difficult to inaugurate as justly to be 
called Utopian. It needs, indeed, a moral standard 
to which our public opinion has not attained. But 
moral standards and public opinion grow, grow with 
increasing rapidity. It is the business of a theorist, 
more especially when treating of broad questions and 
not of details, to hold up the highest and most com- 
plete standard of action which he can see to be prac- 
ticable, without reference to its instant or exact 
application ; and that more particularly when he feels 
a conviction based on history, based on all that lives 



152 ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 

around us, on the incoherence of all other systems, 
— that it is, after all, the only one possible. 

The writer has no wish to exaggerate the in- 
fluence or the feasibility of this or any other scheme. 
The basis of all the practical and political questions 
is an intellectual and moral one. To all practical 
questions there is but a temporary and partial solu- 
tion from practical means by themselves. A policy 
of perfect wisdom carried out by statesmen of perfect 
capacity would not suffice to end the difficulties of 
the West. The system of this work, it has already 
been stated in earlier pages, implies the organisation 
of the West upon a system of common moral and 
intellectual principles, and on one uniform tone of 
public and private life, the whole animated and knit 
together by a common education and a common body 
of moral teachers and guides. How far we are from 
the realisation of this, it is not part of this work to 
consider. It is far from being the belief of this 
present writer that we are near to it. The pre- 
ceding pages therefore, it will be seen, speak only 
of the temporary, the partial, and the practical courses 
to be pursued, and not to any final system or any 
complete resettlement. They are offered as mere 
suggestions for meeting immediate and great neces- 
sities. As makeshifts, as palliatives, as fragments 
only are they offered ; but as being, till a wider basis 
is prepared, the only palliatives possible. 

FREDERIC HARRISON. 



No. III. 



ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 



BY 



E. S. BEESLY. 



ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 



Last year Europe was on the point of meeting in 
Congress. The rumour has recently been revived 
and contradicted; but we shall hear it again before 
long. The air is full of congresses ; all the interna- 
tional vested interests — especially the most powerful 
— look forward to them with a shudder. This is a 
sufficient proof that the Congress of the future is 
not to be of the old Vienna, Laybach, and Yerona 
type, from which the strong might reckon pretty 
securely upon coming out stronger. It is the weak 
and the oppressed who turn an eye of hope and raise 
the head languidly when the murmur passes round. 
It is felt that the obligation to submit private mcli- 
nations to a standard of public utility — an obligation 
long recognised among individuals in civilised parts 
of the world — is about to be extended to nations. 
And just as we may conceive that the men of mighty 
thews and high spirits chafed and fumed when they 
were made equal before the law with a weak and 
humble neighbour, so we need not be surprised that 



156 ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 

powerful self-sufficient nations should swell with of- 
fended dignity when it is proposed that they should 
submit their pretensions to an organised public 
opinion. 

The tendency I have noted is undoubtedly a phase 
of the revolution under which old Europe is melting 
away ; and it is not unnatural that the opposition to 
it should be personified by the hereditary sovereigns ; 
but it would be a mistake to suppose that the sove- 
reigns create the opposition, or that they are actu- 
ated in any considerable degree by personal motives. 
Every sovereign — were he even a Charles II. or a 
Louis XYI. — on international questions feels much 
the same as his subjects, studies their interests, and 
is a tolerably faithful reflex of their sentiments. In 
the eyes of Englishmen it is the Czar who tortures 
Poland. He is but one of seventy million Eussians. 
The occupation of Rome is charged on the machia- 
velian policy of Napoleon III. M. Jules Favre, by 
his own confession, could do no other, were he pre- 
sident of a French republic. International crimes, let 
us never forget, are perpetrated not only upon nations, 
but hy nations. The popular sentiment on such matters 
is probably even more ignorant, bigoted, and unjust 
than that of the ruling class; and the revolutionist, 
who sums up his creed in the subversion of consti- 
tuted governments and the pulling do^vn of privi- 
leged classes, has a very imperfect conception of what 
the revolution means. 

Deep-rooted, however, as is the repugnance of 
every nation at present to submit to any supervision 
in the name of collective Europe, it is useless to 
deny that the idea of such a supervision is gaining 
ground, and will end in being unreservedly recog- 



ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 157 

nised by all; for the popular mind, little troubled by- 
logical consequences, is never roused to indignation 
by some international crime, that it does not in the 
broadest way appeal to the European body as a 
whole, and invoke its interference; each nation thus 
familiarising itself with the general principle, and 
building up the jurisdiction before which in its turn 
it will have to plead. 

This idea, simple and natural as it seems to most 
people, is really of very modern growth. It is the 
latest phase of the revolution. It was unknown in 
the last century ; it was unknown at the Congress of 
Vienna. Xo doubt men cried shame on the spoilers 
of Poland. Our alhances with Maria Theresa a^rainst 
Frederick, and with Frederick against Maria Theresa, 
were decorated with generous phrases, which to the 
popular mind were not absolutely empty. But even 
though we had gone to war from pure chivalry, and 
not from ambition and rapacity, the temporary unre- 
gulated sympathy of one nation for another has about 
as much affinity with a recognised administration of 
pubhc law by all for each as the maxims of knight- 
errantry with the regulations of the metropohtan 
police. The aim in the one case, as in the other, was 
to prevent and redress wrong. But the ideas of Sir 
Eichard Mayne are not those of Sir Galahad ; nor 
do we conceive of international relations and duties 
as our grandfathers did. For example, the Anglo- 
French aUiance against Eussia for an alleged viola- 
tion of European law ; the remonstrances with Austria 
and Prussia for not acceding to that alliance ; the 
proposed interference of the West on behalf of Po- 
land and Denmark, would have been as inconceivable 
to Kaunitz and Talleyrand as a steam-ram or turret- 



158 ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 

ship to Rodney. Whether interference in the cases 
mentioned was justifiable or desirable is another 
question. All I wish to point out is, that a new 
principle has grown up in Europe — the systematic 
and continuous jurisdiction of the West over its con- 
stituent members. 

When Europe sits in judgment, it is vain for 
England to hope that she will escape arraignment. 
I am dealing with foreign questions exclusively, and 
I am therefore spared the necessity of adverting to 
the relations between England and Ireland; relations 
which I admit may one day call for the interference 
of Europe. Our attitude towards non- European races 
is dealt with in other portions of this volume. I pro- 
pose to inquire what defence we can make to the 
charge loudly urged against us by the common voice 
of our neighbours, that we have erected upon a basis 
of violence and injustice a maritime supremacy in- 
compatible- with the orderly and peaceable develop- 
ment of European civilisation. 

I am of course aware that to most Englishmen it 
mil seem downright wickedness even to propose such 
a question for discussion. That England is naturally 
mistress of the seas is supposed to be one of those 
ultimate facts from which all international theories 
must take their start. Whigs and Tories may accuse 
one another of inadequately carrying out this great 
principle; but party malignity never went so far as 
to fasten on an opponent the odious and improbable 
imputation of denying it. Even Mr. Cobden, I be- 
lieve, declared that England ought to maintam a 
naval force superior to any that could be brought 
against it; and I am not aware that Mr. Bright has 
disavowed him. Maritime supremacy, we are given 



ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 159 

to understand, is inseparably annexed to England 
by nature. It has been claimed, asserted, and upon 
the whole maintained by the nation from its earliest 
times. It is the necessary result of our insular 
position. It is bound up with our national life. To 
insist on its abandonment is to ask us to break with 
our whole previous history — to reject our manifest 
destiny. 

To fly in the face of nature and the immemorial 
tradition of a nation is undoubtedly a serious thing. 
But such language is entirely out of place as applied to 
our maritime supremacy, which, even in its most rudi- 
mentary form, cannot be traced back further than the 
battle of La Hogue (1692), and was not established 
beyond dispute till the battle of Trafalgar. So far 
is it from being bound up with the national life, that 
the very idea of it did not dawn on the nation till 
after the Eevolution of 1688. Not an allusion to it 
can be found in Shakspeare, who certainly was not 
disposed to abate a jot of the national pretensions, or 
(so far as I am aware) in Milton, who was quite as 
little imbued with cosmopolitan ideas. Yet the one 
was the contemporary of Ealeigh and Drake, the other 
of Blake and Montague. Our naval history is the his- 
tory of our commerce and of our Protestant middle 
classes. To protect ourselves from invasion by a 
fleet rather than an army was no doubt a natural 
instinct on the part of islanders. Our Catholic and 
agricultural ancestors were as much alive to it as 
their Protestant and commercial descendants. It was 
from Catholic times chiefly that Selden accumulated 
the load of precedents by which he attempted to 
prove that the " four seas" are as much a part of 
English territory as Kent or Sussex. But it had 



160 ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 

never occurred to Selden, when he wrote his Mare 
Clausum^ that England's policy was to develop her 
maritime in preference to her military resources; 
much less that she was to assert that supremacy on 
the seas which the Hapsburgs and Bourbons were 
striving for on the Continent. Catholicism had been 
decisively abandoned, and the feudal organisation of 
society was but faintly traceable ; but the national 
policy was still based on the ideas of Catholic and 
feudal times. True, the consolidation of the chief 
continental Powers had compelled our sovereigns to 
abandon dreams of territorial aggrandisement, except 
in the direction of Scotland. But no vision of a new 
and wider field of conquest had dawned on their 
imagination. Elizabeth long acquiesced in the naval 
superiority of Spain as perfectly natural, and fretted 
at the lawless buccaneering of Hawkins and Grenville 
even while she could not resist the temptation of 
sharing in their plimder. 

The Great Rebellion threw the country for a 
short time into the hands of the middle classes ; and 
Cromwell, as their representative, distinctly hiau- 
gurated the new policy of England. He has gene- 
rally been accused of blindness in turning his arms 
against the pacific merchants of Holland and the 
feeble empire of Spain, rather than against the rising 
power of Louis XIY. Blind indeed he would have 
been if he could not discern what was evident to the 
shallowest politicians. The circumstances of William 
III. left him no choice but to grapple with France. 
Cromwell was under no such necessity. It was no 
part of his plans to check the power of Louis XIY. 
Evidently he had conceived and deliberately entered 
upon the scheme of building up a maritime and colo- 



ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 161 

nial empire witli a view to commerce, leaving France 
to work her will on the Continent; a scheme never 
again clearly conceived or deliberately resumed till 
the policy of England was permanently shaped by 
the master-mind of the elder Pitt.* 

To discuss the morality of such a policy in the 
seventeenth century is unnecessary. The limits of 
patriotism, the subordination of the country to the 
race, were not understood then as they are or may 
be now. Moreover, the morality of a religious man 
like Cromwell was tainted by his theology, and the 
Catholic nation par excellence had to expect some- 
thing less than justice from the champion of Pro- 
testantism. Would that all statesmen were as faithful 
to their consciences as Cromwell ! 

But the career of the Protector was all too short 
for the development of his mighty scheme. If its 
scope and character have been mistaken even by pos- 
terity, with the history of the last century as a com- 
mentary, we cannot wonder if contemporaries failed 
to note the dim outline of which but a short glimpse 
was afforded them. The Stuarts returned, and for 
twenty-eight years England had no policy at all. 
The first Dutch war of Charles II. was indeed a 
coarse and superficial imitation of the measures of 
Cromwell by men who had no insight into their 
meaning. But during the rest of that shameful 
reign the naval and military resources of England 
were simply at the disposal of Louis. Pepys has 

* Cromwell, during his short reign, doubled the national fleet. The 
famous Navigation Act was passed in 1651. Whether we hold with 
Adam Smith that it favoured the growth of our mercantile marine, or 
with M'Culloch that it had a contrary effect, there can be no doubt 
about the intention of the middle-class Parliament which enacted it. 

M 



162 ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 

photographed for us the naval administration of that 
day ; and it is clear that maritime ascendency was the 
last thing which any government contemplated; nor 
does it appear that the people demanded any thing 
more than the security of the Thames and the Med- 
way. Under the reaction which had brought back 
the Stuarts for a time, England had for a time also 
reverted to the old precedents. 

But the Whig or oligarchic revolution came, and 
a compromise was tacitly effected between the rival 
interests — between the territorial aristocracy and the 
commercial middle classes. To the former was re- 
signed the exclusive direction of the machine of 
government, but on the implied condition of direct- 
ing it in the interest of the latter. The distinction, 
the social precedence, the enormous official incomes, 
the opportunities for jobbery, for rewarding adherents, 
for pensioning cadets, — these were the share of the 
aristocracy. Let us add in justice that there have 
always been men to whom the noble satisfaction of 
governing has been the sole attraction. The middle 
classes, on the other hand, abandoning the attempt 
to abolish privilege, and the claim to political equality 
which the nobler spirits among them had asserted in 
the middle of the century, contented themselves with 
•the understanding that their commercial interests 
-should henceforth be the primary object of our for- 
eign policy. They had ascertained their own ability 
to enforce the observance of this condition, and they 
have enforced it ever since. Of course it is not meant 
that this compromise took any definite shape in the 
minds of the statesmen of the E evolution. It was 
at first acted on unconsciously. The growing defi- 
niteness of its conception m^ay be measured by the 



ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 163 

decline of Jacobitism; by the abandonment, that is, 
of old-world theories as to the objects and methods 
of civil government. The final extinction of Jacobit- 
ism and the complete and conscious development of 
the new system were therefore coincident, and are 
marked by the first administration of the great Pitt. 

The statesmen of the oligarchic revolution not 
only were incapable of the large views of Cromwell, 
but had not, like him, the opportunity of choosing 
their course. They were forced by circumstances 
into antagonism mth France. France had acquired 
a preponderance in Europe such as no single state 
had ever before enjoyed. For any single state to 
pretend to deal with her as an equal was absurd. It 
seemed not unlikely that her preeminence might in 
time be converted into actual sovereignty. To avert 
such a fate from the continent of Europe was the 
object to which William of Orange had devoted his 
life. 

This was the conflict of which the battle of La 
Hogue was one of the incidents. In the eyes of 
William the defeat of the French in the Channel was 
an operation subsidiary to his military combinations. 
Assuredly neither he nor any one else foresaw the 
vast results that were to follow from it. The idea 
flashed upon the English people, inspired with its 
first great victory over France since Agincourt, that 
the globe, after all, is terraqueous. France had ac- 
quired a preponderance on the continent of Europe — 
might perhaps conquer an imperial position. Such a 
preponderance, such an empire, might England esta- 
blish on the sea. The idea which Cromwell had 
brooded over in solitude thirty years before was 
grasped by a people. The whole tone of popular 



164 ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 

feeling and language became changed. The navy 
became a profession. The extraordinary exertions 
which England was compelled to make on the Con- 
tinent, and the military genius of the two men who 
swayed her destinies from 1688 to 1711, prevented 
the full enero-ies of the nation from beins; directed in 
the path of maritime aggrandisement. But the lead 
obtained at La Hogue was kept and increased ; above 
all, our future career was irrevocably decided by the 
capture of Gibraltar (1704). Although that enterprise 
was the result of a sudden resolution on the part of 
the admiral in command, yet it must be remembered 
that the expedition had been despatched for the occu- 
pation of Minorca — a design identical in character, 
and which was afterwards recurred to. Rooke knew 
very well what he was about ; for though ostensibly 
employed in asserting the title of the Archduke 
Charles to the Spanish crown, he persisted in hoisting 
the English colours on the fortress, in spite of the re- 
monstrances of the Prince of Darmstadt. By such a 
perfidious act was this standing outrage on the Spa- 
nish nation appropriately inaugurated. 

The capture of Gibraltar was practically our in- 
troduction to the Mediterranean. That sea now 
became a regular cruising-ground for our men-of- 
war. During the last years of the great struggle 
no Erench fleet showed at sea; but our commerce 
suffered terribly from single men-of-war and priva- 
teers. Yet even so the commercial class and the 
Dissenters were to a man for the continuance of the 
war. . The country gentlemen, on the other hand, 
desired no other England than the England of the 
past, such as their forefathers had known her, when 
a merry tussle in Picardy or a dash at Cadiz and 



ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 165 

Vigo were the most important incidents of a war. 
It was with alarm and disgust that they saw their 
country every year drawn more deeply into the vor- 
tex of foreign complications. Already had English 
reo'iments marched from the Scheldt to the Moselle, 
and from the Moselle to the Danube. Nay, but for 
the firm opposition of the States, they would have 
been led across the Alps. Portugal had been held 
by our troops. We had won and lost battles in the 
heart of Spain ; and all this to the impoverishment, 
so they affirmed, of the landed gentry and the ag- 
Sfrandisement of the mercantile class. Palace in- 
trigues and the influence of the clergy over a super- 
stitious people placed the government for a brief 
interval (1710-1714) in the hands of the Tories — 
their only taste of office for more than half a century. 
The two principal measures of the Harley-St. John 
administration are the Qualification Bill and the Peace 
of Utrecht. The object of the former was to keep 
merchants out of parliament; of the latter, to cut 
short our foreign enterprises at any cost. But though 
in their desperate haste for peace they flung away 
the conquests of Marlborough and concerted with our 
enemies the ruin of our allies, the Tory statesmen 
did not dare to thwart the nation in the new career 
on which it had set its heart. The posts in the Me- 
diterranean were retained ; the monopoly of the slave- 
trade was secured. The right of sending one trading 
ship every year to Spanish America might seem an 
unimportant concession; but it was the thin end of 
the wedge, which our merchants well knew how to 
drive home. 

The Tories had their day, but it was a short one. 
It had certainly not been their intention to stimulate 



166 ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 

the appetite for conquest ; but, by putting a stop to 
the barren struggle which Marlborough would have, 
delighted to continue, they had in truth but concen- 
trated the national energies on maritime enterprise. 
When the Whigs returned to office on the accession 
of George I., that policy was resumed by the Towns- 
hend - Stanhope administration with more clearness 
than ever. An opportunity was soon found for an- 
nihilating the Spanish navy without any declaration 
of war (Passaro, 1718), — an act which was warmly 
approved by Parliament. The Regent Orleans, tied 
close by his private interests to the house of Hanover, 
placed the resources of France at our disposal; and 
the strange spectacle was seen of a combined British 
and French fleet burning the arsenals, docks, and 
half-built ships of Yigo. 

The long administration of Walpole commenced in 
1720. Disliking war, as full of pitfalls for ministers, 
he lost no time in patching up a peace with Spain, 
by promise of restoring Gibraltar and Minorca, and 
refunding the value of the fleet destroyed at Passaro ; 
promises which cost Walpole nothing, and which it 
is needless to say were never performed. When 
Spain, six years later, pressed for their fulfilment, 
the answer of England was to send out a fleet to 
seize the American treasure-ships, without any de- 
claration of war. Hosier failed in this shameful 
attempt. War was at the same time declared against 
the Emperor for having dared to establish the 
" Ostend Company" for Eastern trade. France, 
under the incapable Fleury, with incredible folly 
looked tamely on while England was asserting these 
monstrous pretensions and building up a maritime 
tyranny. The English minister was notoriously 



ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 167 

averse to war; but the commercial class was insa- 
tiable, and knew how to stir the passions of the 
country. Ample supplies had been furnished by 
Parliament, and deep dissatisfaction was manifested 
when Walpole again patched up peace, although 
Gibraltar was retained, and the Ostend Company 
given up. 

The treaty of Seville, however, could not be any 
thino^ but a truce while all the causes of disao^ree- 
ment remained. During the succeeding ten years 
(1729-1739) our relations with Spain became more 
embittered from day to day. Those who have ob- 
served the proceedings of our merchants in Chinese 
and Japanese waters need not be told what were 
the means adopted for " opening up" the Spanish 
colonies in the last century. The permission for a 
limited trade extorted from Spain was made the 
cloak for a vast system of smuggling. Violence and 
fraud, bullying and corruption, were practised alter- 
nately. When the Spanish coast-guard endeavoured 
to repress these lawless proceedings, a howl of fury 
arose from the merchants. An unscrupulous Oppo- 
sition, hungry for place, were barking round the 
prudent but equally unscrupulous minister who clung 
to it. Pulteney and Carteret, Chesterfield and Pitt, 
thundered night after night about the honour of 
England and the insolence of Spain; till at length 
"Walpole, with his eyes open to the folly as well as 
injustice of war, allowed himself to be kicked into it. 
The nation was in a delirium of joy. The spirit 
of the buccaneer had entered into a whole people. 
Already, in their greedy imagination, our sailors 
were rifling the supposed treasures of the Indies, and 
pouring a flood of gold and silver over this free and 



168 ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 

Protestant land. " They are ringing their bells 
now," said Sir Kobert ; " they will be wringing 
their hands before long." As he had foreseen, we 
had soon a French war also on our hands and a 
rebellion in Scotland. If, indeed, our efforts had 
been directed to the single object of extending our 
maritime empire, we should have had little to fear; 
but here, as always, Hanover was the fatal drag. It 
may be safely affirmed that, but for the Hanoverian 
connection, by the end of the century no continental 
Power would have had a navy, a commerce, or a 
colony. Fortunate was it for mankind that so ter- 
rible a despotism was averted. Fortunate was it for 
England that insular selfishness had not full play; 
that she had not the opportunity of excommunicating 
herself from the Western state system. 

The connection between Protestantism and com- 
mercial immorality has always been marked, and is 
not altogether accidental. Mr. Carlyle, therefore, is 
justified in regarding the "war for Jenkins's ear" as 
an episode in the grand struggle between Cathohcism 
and Protestantism ; though, to people who retain 
old-fashioned notions about right and wrong, such 
a defence may seem less satisfactory than it does to 
the biographer of Frederic. It must be remembered 
that, while we were evincing such a generous anxiety 
to confer upon the Spanish colonies the blessings of 
free trade, we were compelling our own colonies to 
trade exclusively with the mother country, and con- 
quering the dependencies of our neighbours in order 
to bring them within our own protective system, for 
the benefit of English trade. 

The war terminated, as Walpole had foreseen, un- 
favourably for England. Much loot had been secured 



ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 169 

by individuals; but the only conquest of importance 
was Cape Breton, and that had to be disgorged at 
the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748). So low did 
our reputation for honourable dealing at this time 
stand, that we had actually to give hostages for per- 
forming our stipulations ; the only instance in modern 
times. But the English people felt that it held tne 
winning cards. If the game was being lost, it was 
by the gross incapacity of the players. In 1757 the 
national voice summoned a great man to the helm. 
The idea of a maritime and colonial empire had been 
working in the popular mind since the Eevolution, 
but it had not been clearly formulated or decisively 
carried out. Our manifest advantages would not fail 
to suggest from time to time to the Stanhopes and 
Vernons, that this port should be seized or that fleet 
destroyed. But no statesman since Cromwell had 
distinctly imagined a supremacy, or formed a vast 
and consistent scheme for realising it. Pitt was 
the most towering statesman that England has pro- 
duced. In capacity he may probably be reckoned 
with the two or three great rulers who stand out 
from universal history as founders or creators of a 
new order of things. But it was not his fate, as 
theirs, to be placed in the crisis of a revolution when 
all existing systems and authorities are crumbling 
away, and reconstruction quocumque modo is a neces- 
sity. He worked in the gyves of a constitution. He 
had to play a game of which others had invented the 
rules. In England a half-witted, obstinate George III., 
or a Duke of Bedford swollen with selfishness and 
pride, are greater powers than a Pitt. Great things 
may be done in four years, but not the greatest. What 
of life and health Pitt had before him in 1757 would 



V 



170 ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 

have been all too little for building up an empire. 
It was much that in four short years, with wretched 
health, without a party, in the face of powerful family 
interests, with a continental war to be kept up as a 
pure ohjet de luxe for the sovereign, he did map out 
the ground-plan, lay the foundations, and rear up the 
main walls of the imperial edifice with such distinct- 
ness and solidity, that succeeding architects had no 
choice but to follow his design. 

The conditions of action had entirely changed since 
Cromwell had brooded over a similar scheme. To 
conciliate France with a view to the ruin of the 
Spanish Empire was now out of the question, j The 
danger impending over Europe from British ambi- 
tion had for some time been patent to every one ; and 
France was determined not to surrender her com- 
merce, her colonies, and her right to be a naval 
power without a struggle. \ It seemed advisable to 
Pitt to endeavour to secure the alliance of Spain. 
The bribe he offered was Gibraltar, in return for 
which Spain was to aid in the recovery of Minorca. 
The possession of Minorca, though from a mihtary 
point of view far more important than Gibraltar, 
would of course have been less gratifying to British 
pride, because it would not so palpably trample on 
the dignity of Spain. Perhaps this consideration was 
not without its influence on Pitt, whose ideas of na- 
tional honour, if not reconcilable to a lofty morality, 
were at least not those of a mob -orator or a jour- 
nalist. Our historians, in their tenderness for a name 
of which England is so proud, touch as lightly as 
possible on this sad indiscretion. 

/ The fleets of France were soon swept from the 
/ seas. But this was not enough for Pitt. He car- 



ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 171 

ried the war into the very harbours of Normandy \ 
and Brittany. He desired not only to destroy the ] 
existing na^y of France, but to make it impossible / 
for her to create another. In the mean time her 
settlements in Africa, in America, in East and West 
Indies were torn from her one after another. Wolfe 
robbed her of Canada ; Clive and Coote of India. 
In those four years Pitt may be said to have deter- 
mined the destiny of France no less decisively than 
that of his own country. We often hear the remark 
that the French have no ajDtitude for colonisation. 
If those who make it would look a little further than 
Algeria and Cochin China, they would find that pre- 
vious to Pitt's administration the colonies of France 
were numerous and flourishing. Less brutal and in- 
tolerant than the Protestant Anglo-Saxon, the French 
settler fraternised and intermarried with the natives, 
instead of exterminatino: them ; and the advantao^e 
to humanity of the monopoly of colonisation enjoyed 
in recent times by the Anglo-Saxon race is at least 
questionable.* It was Pitt who excluded France 
from transmarine development, and forced her to con- 
centrate her energies and attention on her European 
position. 

In Pitt the commercial class had at last found its 
statesm^m. In those days of protective duties a co- 
lony meant a market for home produce and^ manufac- 
tures. Then, as now, our merchants expected our\ 
fleets and armies to be employed in forcing British/ 
goods on reluctant customers. The French and 

* "Mr. Roebuck's antipathy to black people and brown people is 
only the conscious and articulate expression of a tendency which pre- 
vails wherever the English language comes into juxtaposition with 
barbarous dialects." Saturday Review^ on New Zealand, Sept. 2, 1865. 



I 

V 



172 ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 

Spanish colonies were conquered in the name of pro- 
tection. The empires of China and Japan are as- 
sailed in the name of free trade. The British mer- 
chant no longer cries for war in Europe; but he 
knows how to insist on it in Asia. The citizens of 
London recorded on the monument to Pitt, in the 
Guildhall, that under his administration they had 
found " commerce united with and made to flourish 
by war." Let us hope that our opium-smuggling 
millionaires may not be less grateful to Lord Pal- 
merston. 

The interests of Spam were so manifestly those 
of France that even the offer of Gibraltar had not 
tempted her to abet the policy of Pitt. As the war 
went on she became more and more alarmed at the 
despotic power England was acquiring, and the out- 
rageous arrogance that already marked its exercise. 
Hundreds of neutral ships had been made prizes for 
carrying French colonial produce. English cruisers 
had captured French vessels in neutral harbours. 
English settlers had audaciously established them- 
selves on Spanish territory in Central America. 
English merchants pushed their illicit traffic with 
redoubled vigour and impudence. It seemed time 
for the smaller maritime Powers to make a stand, if 
they would preserve a shred of their natural right to 
the common highway of nations. In 1761 Pitt re- 
quired an explanation of the activity apparent in the 
Spanish dockyards. Shipbuilding on the part of any 
Continental Power was already, it seems, a high 
crime. Later in the same year a secret treaty was 
concluded between Spain and France. Pitt knew of 
the existence of this treaty, and insisted that war 
should be immediately declared against Spain. Eng- 



ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 173 

land was now fairly embarked on her career of con- 
quest. All the great minister's plans were laid ; the 
treasure-galleons were to be seized; the Isthmus of 
Panama was to be occupied; Havanna and the Phi- 
lippines conquered. Spain would have been struck 
down before she had time to look about her. But 
Pitt was no longer omnipotent in the cabinet. A 
monarch obstinate as he was mcapable, and false as 
he was pious, had recently succeeded to the throne ; 
and for the first time under a Hanoverian prince the 
Tories had found their way to court. A great war, 
directed by a great man, was as disagreeable to the 
court of George III. in 1760 as it had been to the 
court of Anne in 1712. Unlilve Marlborough, Pitt 
was not the man to cling to office when he could no 
longer carry out his ideas. He retired, followed by 
the regrets of the nation ; and the king and his fa- 
vourite soon got rid of the war. The peace of Paris 
(1763) was not so conspicuously a surrender of Bri- 
tish influence and British conquests as the peace of 
Utrecht. Still there can be no doubt that far harder 
terms might have been imposed on the Continental 
Powers. If St. John in the one case, and Bute in 
the other, declined to press our advantages, it was 
not by large views of international morality that they 
were actuated, but by personal interest. 

From the peace of Paris to the American rebelHon 
(1763-1775) England maintained a pacific attitude. 
But if no aggressive steps were taken ; if there was 
no attempt to press boldly on in the path marked out 
by Pitt, it is clear that the principle of his policy — 
namely, that our empire should be built on commerce 
— was now thoroughly understood and accepted by 
all classes of politicians. One example may suffice. 



174 ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 

TChe first partition of Poland was arranged in 1772. 
Even in those days it profoundly shocked Europe. 
Our ministers objected to it. But on what grounds? 
Their despatches, according to Lord Mahon, "say 
nothing of the danger of disturbing the balance of 
power; they do not dwell on the ill example from 
such a violation of the public law ; they are silent as 
to motives of compassion for the injured Poles ; they 
descant only on the possible interruption and disturb- 
.ance of British trade." 

The American rebellion was a rude blow to our 
colonial and maritime ascendency. The worst king 
of a bad line was on the throne. A Tory ministry 
made his pleasure their rule of action. In justice it 
must be said that a large part of the nation were as 
blind and bigoted as their sovereign. Never was there 
a more unnecessary disruption than that of America 
from England. It is usual to say that it would have 
come sooner or later ; and perhaps this is true ; but 
let us not misconceive the reason. There was no 
divergence of interests; there was no desire for in- 
dependence on the part of the colonists. The dis- 
tance had caused little inconvenience, and would have 
caused less. If the separation was inevitable, it was 
because the divergences in the life and thought of 
the two countries would have become more evident 
as communication became easier. The one was re- 
publican by inheritance; the other oligarchic by 
habit. Education was diffused in the one; ignor- 
ance was the rule in the other. In America the 
mass of the people were not trained to pay a de- 
grading homage to rank and wealth, as in England. 
The condition, therefore, of a permanent union was 
either that America should inoculate herself with 



ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 175 

rottenness, or that England should be politically, 
and still more socially, revolutionised. To speculate 
further on such an hypothesis would be waste of 
time. 

The lano-uao^e of Pitt throuo^hout the American 
war was perfectly consistent "vvith his former policy. 
His attempts to define the rights of the mother 
country were illogical enough; but there was a pe- 
riod in the quarrel when they would have been 
eagerly accepted by the colonists as a basis for ac- 
commodation. One concession, and one only, Pitt 
would not listen to. He could not endure to think 
of the disruption of the mighty empire he had built 
up. Nothing is more tragic than the spectacle of his 
agony as he passed out of the world with the con- 
\iction that, after all, he had lived in vain. The life 
of the statesman seemed to ebb with that of his coun- 
tr}^, and to fly with a groan indignant to the shades 
when her dissolution appeared to be accomplished. 
Perhaps there were Frenchmen who had felt a pang- 
as great eighteen years before. In his last bitter hour 
did the ex-minister's thoughts go back to that " dis- 
memberment of a great and most noble monarchy" ? 
"Was this what had come of " commerce united with 
and made to flourish by war" ? 

Chatham died despairing. If his life had been 
prolonged but a little, he would have seen England 
steady herself after the shock. The commencement 
of the revolutionary war found her with one hundred 
and fifty ships of the line, and the Three-per-cents at 
ninety-nine. This prosperity was due to the vigor- 
ous and enlightened administration of Chatham's son. 
The younger Pitt lived to be a curse to his country 
and to Europe ; but there is no period in the history 



176 ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 

of England on which my mind dwells with such un- 
mixed pleasure as on the first six years of his ad- 
ministration (1783-9). With all the courage and 
enthusiasm of youth, guided by a prudence which 
old age does not often attain, he plunged into the 
foul jungle of abuses that had thriven so vigorously 
in the congenial soil of parliamentary government, 
and cleared them away with glorious energy. A 
born financier, he had eagerly embraced the new 
doctrines of political economy. No financial and eco- 
nomic reforms before or since can be compared in 
imjDortance with his achievements in those six years. 
This is not the place to allude to any of them except 
the commercial treaty with France. French writers 
who worship Fox, and can see plainly that the son 
of Chatham inherited an undying hatred to France 
and Frenchmen, should read the speeches of the rival 
statesmen on that noble measure.* It was Fox who 
maintained that "as France was the natural and un- 
alterable enemy of England, no sincerity could be 
expected from her ; no interest could eradicate what 
was rooted in her constitution ; and the proposed 
mtercourse must prove injurious to the national cha- 
racter of England." It was the " ennemi clu genre 
humain " who replied that " the quarrels between 
France and Britain had too long continued not only 
to harass those two great nations themselves, but to 
embroil the peace of Europe ; nay, they had dis- 
turbed the tranquillity of the most remote parts of 
the world. They had by their past conduct acted 
as if they were intended for the destruction of each 

* It is astonishing that an historian usually so well-informed and 
candid as M. Louis Blanc should adopt this vulgar error respecting 
Pitt in its most extravagant form. 



ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 177 

other; but he hoped the time was now come when 
they would justify the order of the universe, and 
show that they were better calculated for the more 
amiable purpose of friendly intercourse and mutual 
benevolence. Considering the treaty in a political 
point of view, he should not hesitate to contend 
agamst the too - frequently advanced doctrine that 
France was and must be the unalterable enemy of 
Britain. To suppose that any nation was unalter- 
ably the enemy of another was weak and childish. 
It had neither its foundation in the experience of 
nations nor in the history of man. It was a libel 
on the constitution of political societies, and supposed 
diabolical malice in the original frame of man." 

Terrible but righteous retribution on the man who 
deserted his principles and sinned against light and 
knowledge! Pitt, the minister of peace and civilisa- 
tion, of reform and progress, is forgotten. The world 
remembers, and will remember, nothing but the 
bloody laws, the oppressive government, the waste- 
ful administration, the public misery amid which the 
apostate statesman descended to his grave. Even 
during his life he tasted the bitterness of his doom ; 
but doubtless he clung to the hope that future ages 
would never forget that glorious six years which, in 
spite of all that followed, he knew to be an epoch 
in our history. Could he have foreseen that sixty 
years after his death excitable county members in 
some Boeotian congress would describe themselves 
as " Tories of the school of Pitt," I am inclined to 
think he would have preferred oblivion : 

" Has toties optata exegit gloria poenas." 

Even the price for which he sold his honour is denied 

N 



178 ENGLAND AND THE SEA.^ 

him; and the man to whom, after his father, we owe 
it that " the smi never sets on the dominions of 
England," is sniffed at by Lord Macaulay as "the 
most incapable of war ministers." 

So far was Pitt from welcoming war with France, 
that he was probably the last man of his party to 
make up his mind to it. It was not till he saw the 
fanaticism of the Tories and the Burke section of 
the Whigs rising to a point which left him no alter- 
native between heading the counter-revolution and 
being driven from power, that he swallowed his con- 
victions and regretfully abandoned the paths in which 
his genius loved to walk. Even so late as the sum- 
mer of 1792 he tried to negotiate a coalition with 
Fox; which he could have desired for no other ob- 
ject than to put a check on his own rabid followers 
and the malignant old dotard on the throne.* But 
when once he had determined on his policy, he never 
faltered in carrying it out. He rushed into war to 
keep office, or rather let us say — for there was no- 
thing sordid about Pitt — to keep power. To retrace 
his steps would have been to admit his mistake and 
succumb to Fox. Something too must be allowed 
for the fascination which a war of conquest cannot 
fail to have for those who have once tasted it. And 
Pitt had determined that it should be a war of con- 
quest — such a war as Chatham had conducted — a 
war to promote the wealth, commerce, and maritime 
ascendency of England. That this last object had 

* The negotiation failed because Fox, like a true Whig, insisted 
that the head of a great Whig family should be premier. This was no 
other than the stolid Duke of Portland, who was so far from sharing 
Fox's views about France, that he deserted to the Tories a few months 
later. 



ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 179 

never been lost sight of, even during his pacific ad- 
ministration, is perfectly clear. I will not now dwell; 
on the attitude he assumed towards Russia and Spain. 
It is more important to notice his intrigues in thC; 
United Provinces. 

As a naval Power the Dutch were always the 
natural allies of France. The insane polic}^ of Louis 
XIY. had for a time thrown them into the arms of 
England ; but when that disturbing cause was re- 
moved, the old relations were renewed. The Stadt- 
holders naturally desired to develop the army as an 
instrument of tyranny. The Republican party, on 
the contrary, guided by an instinct no less sure, 
were for starving the army and fostering the navy. 
Thus the Stadtholder was playing the game of Eng- 
land, and was backed by English diplomacy zeal- 
ously, effectually, and unscrupulously.* In 1787 — 
less than two years before the French Revolution — 
Prussia, at the instigation of the English Govern- 
ment, marched an army into Holland, and sujDpressed 
the Republican Constitution ; after which England 
and Prussia concluded a treaty with the Stadtholder, 
by which they guaranteed his authority (1788)- 
Four years afterwards, a vague offer of assistance 
on the part of the French Convention to peoples 
struggling for liberty was held by England to be 
a casus belli /f 

^' See the Malmesbury Correspondence, vol. ii. passim. 

t Mr. Massey — who, by the way, used to sit for the Radical borough 
of Salford — approves the conduct of the English G-overnment both in 
1787-8 and in 1792-3. " Tant d'impudence," as Danton said to the re- 
actionists of his time, " commence a nous peser." Time was when it was 
the custom to whisper mysteriously of a rising young man, that he was 
" a Whig and something more." Most of that class may now be styled 
" Whigs and something less." 



180 ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 

The mouth of the Scheldt lies in Dutch territory, 
and the treaties of Westphalia and Utrecht had closed 
it to the great manufacturing and commercial towns 
of Belgium lying higher up the stream. Catholic 
Antwerp and Ghent had been ruined, that the Pro- 
testants of Amsterdam and Rotterdam might thrive. 
What the interest of England was, or was supposed 
to be, may be inferred from the saying of Napoleon, 
that he would hold Antwerp as a pistol at the heart 
of England. England, therefore, looked on the closing 
of the Scheldt as a point she had a right to insist 
upon. That a noble river, provided by nature as a 
highway for commerce, should flow idle to the sea; 
that great cities should dwindle and decay; that a 
dense and industrious population should sink into 
poverty, — -all this was only right and proper if the 
interests of England, or rather of the English middle 
class, demanded it. When, therefore, Dumouriez, 
amidst the tumultuous rejoicings of the Belgians, an- 
nounced that the navigation of the Scheldt was open, 
the traditional policy of England prescribed inter- 
ference. 

In the summer of 1792 the conquest of Belgium 
by Dumouriez seemed in the highest degree impro- 
bable. In the autumn it was an accomplished fact. 
This astonishing change in the aspect of affairs un- 
''doubtedly supplied Pitt with a suitable pretext for 
abandoning his pacific policy. How far it really 
influenced his judgment it is impossible to say. If 
the coahtion between Fox and Pitt had been effected 
in the summer, I am by no means prepared to afiirm 
that war would have been avoided even for a time. 
The French Government would have been addressed 
in the conciliatory and sympathetic language of Fox, 



ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 181 

instead of being outraged by the studied insolence of 
Grenville. But Fox had always emphatically ap- 
proved our Dutch policy; and if he had been in 
office, instead of in opposition, I believe he would 
have drawn the sword in defence of it with less 
reluctance than the thrifty and peace-loving Pitt. 

However this may bej^o candid person who reads \ 
the diplomatic correspondence and parliamentary de- 
bates with due attention to dates can doubt that the 
proximate and decisive cause of our long war "svith 
France was her denial of our monstrous claim to 
close a great navigable river to commerce. The 
treaty of 1788 no doubt bound us to protect Hol- 
land ; but it was notorious that the Dutch, on whom 
the brunt of the war was sure to fall, preferred to 
acquiesce in the opening of the Scheldt. All the 
energy of our ambassador had failed to extract from 
them any requisition for assistance; and Fox could 
most justly denounce the hypocrisy and cruelty of 
forcing it upon them. Fox was precluded by his 
own previous language from pointing out that the 
treaty thus paraded had been imposed upon the 
unfortunate Dutch four years before by England, 
Prussia, and the Stadtholder, at the point of the 
bayonet. Pitt could not resist the combined pres- 
sure of the mercantile interest and the fanatics, and 
the war began.* 

" A letter [Dec. 2, 1792] from Maret, the French envoy, to his 
Government (which one would have thought Mr. Massey might have 
found room to notice in his bulky book) is worth quoting, for the 
light it throws on Pitt's views. " Mr. Pitt," he says, " dreads war 
much more than the aristocracy of opposition. [Fox's patron, for in- 
stance, the Duke of Portland.] That party in the Ministry at the 
head of which is my Lord Hawkesbury, and which professes the most 
absolute royalism, desires war ; they have the majority in the Council ; 
Mr. Pitt is thus personally interested in our having pacific inten- 



^182 ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 

There is, perhaps, no portion of our history which 
has been so disguised by English writers as the part we 
played in Europe during that tremendous struggle. 

' The common belief is that we stood ujd, sometimes 
with allies, sometimes single-handed, for the liberties 
of Europe ; and that for twenty-two years the nations 
of the Continent blessed and prayed for Old England 
as their only champion against French oppression. 
That we exhibited extraordinary pluck and perti- 
nacity no one will deny; and those are qualities of 

• which a nation does right to be proud. But the fact 

t, that our object during the first fourteen years of 
e war was, not to drive France from the prey, but 
get a share of it for ourselves. The division was 
ade on the old principle laid down by the great 
Pitt, and carried out by his son, — the Continent to 
France, for what she can make of it; the sea and 
transmarine settlements to England. France, for 
example, overruns Holland ; England forthwith helps 
herself to the Dutch colonies : France seizes Malta ; 
England turns out the French, and keeps Malta for 
herself. Be it observed that, while France eventually 

tions." Negotiations between Britain and Spain had certainly gone 
on, but " Mr, Pitt has had very httle share in them." He then gives 
an account of an interview he had had with Pitt that morning. Pitt 
tells him that the mercantile interest is much alarmed on the subject 
of Holland, and that Government is determined to support the Dutch. 
For himself, he assures Maret of his anxious desire to avoid a breach, 
and begs him earnestly to have a secret agent sent from Paris, w^ith 
whom negotiations might be continued, or to obtain powers himself. 
" Do not," he said, "reject the sole means of bringing us together, and 
of making us understand each other. Do not lose an instant in sending 
to Paris : I assure you that every moment is precious, — that nothing 
is more urgent." It appears from this conversation that war would 
have been declared, whether Louis had been executed or not. Maret 
always retained his belief in the sincerity of Pitt, See Annual Register 
for 1792, p. 193. 



ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 183 

disgorged her sliare, we kept, and at the present 
moment hold, the best part of ours. Undoubtedly, 
with the king, the aristocracy, and the clergy, the 
main object was to crush liberal principles; but the 
commercial class was animated by a motive much less 
respectable, — a shameless thirst for gain; while all 
classes alilve exulted in the aggrandisement which 
every year of the war brought to the nation. 

In 1797 conferences were held at Lille with a 
view to peace. England had no longer the pretence, 
as in the year before, to insist on the relinquishment 
by France of her conquests from Austria, for Austria 
had voluntarily, nay gladly, consented to cede them 
to France, in exchange for Venetia. That arrange- 
ment was, no doubt, a grossly immoral one. But it 
was no aiFair of ours, nor did we pretend that it 
was. We had not lost an acre of ground; on the 
contrary, we had conquered colonies, French, Dutch, 
and Spanish, all over the world. We had not the 
smallest excuse, as every one now admits, for the 
terrible war we had forced upon France. ISTaturally, 
therefore, France demanded that we should relin- 
quish our conquests, if we wished for peace. What 
was the answer of the British Government? We 
professed ourselves ready to restore all the colonies 
of France, and some belonging to other countries. 
But we insisted on withholding Trinidad from Spain, 
and Trincomalee from Holland — Holland, for whose 
liberation we professed to be fighting. The cham- 
pions of European freedom are thus found advancing 
precisely the same immoral claims as France and 
Austria. It is not, however, to be beheved for a 
moment that we deliberately accepted a continuation 
of that deadly struggle rather than give up Trinidad 



184 ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 

or Trincomalee, valuable as those possessions un- 
doubtedly were. It was the disgorgmg of our other 
rich conquests which we could not bring ourselves to 
endure. Pitt, who had now tasted blood, felt sure of 
stirring up a fresh conflict on the Continent, and he 
was bent on holding tight what he had won. There 
were more colonies to be picked up. The maritime 
powers were not yet thoroughly crushed. The trade 
of the world was falling into our hands ; our imports 
and exports had increased enormously during the 
war; and so 6 'jro'Kzihog I^Tsro; was the cry throughout 
England. 

Our aims were thoroughly understood by the rest 
of Europe. At the outbreak of the revolution, Spain 
and Holland, or rather the governments of those 
countries, had been prevailed on, in the teeth of their 
true and traditional policy, to join us in destroying 
the navy of France. Spain saw her folly too late, 
and endeavoured to retrace her steps. We annihi- 
lated her fleet at the battle of St. Vincent. The 
- Dutch populace received the Republican army with 
enthusiasm, which gave us the opportunity of putting 
the finishing stroke to our ancient rivals at the battle 
of Camperdown. '' The Dutch sailors," says Alison, 
" fought with the most admirable skill and courage, 
and proved themselves worthy descendants of Van 
Tromp andDe Euyter; but the prowess of the British 
i^ was irresistible." Thus in the space of four years the 
/ champions of European freedom managed to clear out 
I of their way the three most powerful continental navies, 
I and to conquer a more commanding position than they 
\ had ever enjoyed, even under the elder Pitt. 

The war went on, and England continued her con- 
/quests. " The condition of the empire," says Alison, 



ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 185 

"at the period (1801) was unprecedentedly wealthy 
and prosperous ; the exports had tripled and the im- 
ports had more than tripled since the commencement 
of the war." When the First Consul, therefore, in 
1800, proposed to treat, the English ministry rejected 
his advances twice over in the most insulting lan- 
guage, refusing even to name any terms on which 
they would be prepared to negotiate. It ought to 
be clearly understood that at this juncture (January 
1800) it was not France so much as England that 
excited the jealousy and apprehension of Europe. 
Austria, triumphant in the last campaign, so far from 
dreading spoliation, was meditating an invasion of 
France. Prussia was disposed to the French alliance, 
as a counterpoise to Austria and Russia. Spain and 
Holland, as maritime powers, thought of nothing but 
the colonies torn from them by England. Russia, 
while fighting to put down the revolution, considered 
that resistance to the maritime tyranny of England 
was a point of at least equal importance. Why, in 
fact, should Europe then, or at any other time, have 
feared France? Nothing but the selfish rivalries of 
the German courts could have enabled even Napoleon 
to establish himself beyond the Rhine; whereas it 
had been proved, and was to be proved again, that 
England could maintain her maritime supremacy 
against the united elForts of Europe. What Avonder, 
therefore, if England was at that time looked on as 
the common enemy of Europe ? It is an undeniable 
fact that in 1800 the only Power which did not 
eagerly desire the humiliation of England was Aus- 
tria, which had no maritime interests.* 

'"' I ought, perhaps, to notice, as another exception, Portugal, our 
ancient and sincere ally. When, during the negotiations of 1801, 



ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 

Such was the state of things which led to the 
formation of the maritime confederacy at the close 
of 1800. It was no secret even in the early part of 
that year that the Northern Powers — Eussia, Sweden, 
and Denmark — were meditating a reassertion of the 
principles proclaimed by the Empress Catherine in 
1780, but which the "armed neutrality" at that 
time had failed to establish. These were, that free 
ships make free goods ; that contraband articles must 
be defined by treaty; that blockades must be effec- 
tive; that convoyed ships cannot be searched. In 
December 1800 the confederacy was actually formed, 
and the Emperor Paul, who had already made peace 
with Erance, called on the First Consul to concert 
measures for liberating the seas. jBut before the 
/Northern Powers could get their fleets out of harbour 
V Parker and Nelson were upon them. By the terri- 
ble battle of Copenhagen (April 1800) Denmark was 
forced to seek an armistice, during which Nelson 
went up the Baltic to look for the Swedish and Eus- 
sian fleets. But the murder of Paul, and the discon- 
tent of the Eussian landholders at the stoppage of 
their exports, were more efl'ectual than the victory of 
Copenhagen in breaking up the confederacy. Before 
the autumn it had ceased to exist. It only remains 
to be said that the progress of civilisation has since 
forced England to concede all the points in dispute. 

The peace of Luneville (1801) had left England 
standing alone. Although the merchants, shipowners, 
and loanmongers — the Lairds, Lindsays, and Spences 
of that day — were eager to fight on, the rest of the 

Bonaparte threatened to seize Portugal, as a mode of coercing England, 
our reply was, that in that case we should appropriate the Portuguese 
colonies ! 



ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 187 

nation was sick of the war. Trade was flourishing, 
and large fortunes were being made; but the labour- 
ing population was simply starving. The governing 
classes were less rabid against France smce Bonaparte 
had crushed democracy. The Catholic question had 
forced Pitt to resign ofiice ; and the Addington 
ministry, disquieted by the misery of the country and 
the prospect of isolation, determined to treat. 

In the negotiations which preceded the Peace 
of Amiens (1801-2) we at first proposed the uti 
possidetis as a basis; we wished, that is, to keep all 
our plunder. This, however, Bonaparte Avould not 
hear of, declaring that he would never abandon his 
efibrts to crush England unless she disgorged all or 
most of her enormous gains ; and we eventually 
modified our pretensions. All things considered, we 
had no cause to complain of the terms of the treaty. 
Trinidad conquered from Spain, and Ceylon from 
Holland, remained in our hands. Those colonies, 
our conquests in India, and our maritime superiority, 
were a very handsome profit on the war. But hardly 
had peace been proclaimed, when the most influ- 
ential classes of the nation began to regret that so 
much had been yielded. The protective system pur- 
sued by Bonaparte disappointed our merchants of the 
profits they had expected from the resumption of 
trade. The splendid position of France tormented 
us with jealousy. Our troops had not yet evacuated 
Malta, as stipulated by the treaty; and in the face 
of the popular feeling, the feeble Addington ministry 
did not dare to withdraw them. Now Malta was, in 
the opinion of Bonaparte, one of the most valuable 
positions in Europe: he had thought it worth bar- 
tering against Egypt. To retain it, therefore, was to 



188 ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 

reopen the war. The pretexts put forward for this 
violation of our engagements were the annexation of 
Piedmont, the acceptance by Bonaparte of the presi- 
dency of the Cisalpine republic, and his intervention 
in Switzerland, — acts which certainly had been ac- 
complished since the peace of Amiens. But we had 
refused to be parties to the treaty of Luneville, 
which settled the Continent ; we had refused to 
admit continental questions into the treaty of Amiens. 
Bonaparte had scrupulously performed all his engage- 
ments at Amiens. If any Powers had a right to 
complain of his last proceedings, it was the signa- 
taries of the treaty of Luneville ; but they were 
indemnifying themselves at the expense of the eccle- 
siastical states in Germany. Moreover, the intentions 
of Bonaparte with regard to Italy were notorious 
when we made peace. He had not affected to 
conceal them. As for the intervention in Switzer- 
land, it was but momentary, and did not effect any 
territorial change. Alison himself allows that it 
"was marked by unusual moderation." Our pre- 
tence, therefore, that these acts absolved us from ful- 
filling our engagements in the treaty of Amiens was 
too transparent to deceive any one. In fact, the 
mean shuffling and higgling of our ministers showed 
our true motive. At first they professed themselves 
ready to surrender Malta, if Russia would take charge 
of it. When Russia with considerable reluctance 
undertook this office, they offered to surrender all 
the island except the fortifications ; and finally made 
the cool proposal that England should retain it for 
ten years. The unvarying answer of Bonaparte was, 
" The treaty, and nothing but the treaty ;" and it 
was on this question, and no other, that war was re- 



ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 189 

sumed. However English historians may disguise it, 
this was the simple fact. 

It is clear that Bonaparte ardently desired peace. 
He had thrown himself with all the energy of his 
nature into schemes of colonisation, public works, 
commerce, and improvements of every kind. The 
renewal of the war baulked him in all these projects, 
and he turned on England with a fury thenceforth 
implacable.* He had indeed already shown himself 
overbearing and unscrupulous in his dealings with 
Europe ; but not more so than the statesmen of 
England, Austria, and Prussia. When France, after 
being menaced with political extinction by the allied 
sovereigns, had hurled them back across her fron- 
tiers and forced them to sue for peace, of course she 
ought to have halted there; she ought not to have 
annexed a village that was not fairly French. But 
to expect such self-restraint from any nation even 
now would be rash; in the last century it was out 
of the question. The renewal of the war was the 
turning-point of Bonaparte's career. Intoxicated 
with his successes, he believed himself invincible; 
and losing that fear of consequences which counts 

^' At St. Helena, Napoleon said that his intention was to maintain 
peace for a few years, until his finances and navy were in a satis- 
factory condition, and then to recommence the war. It is curious to 
find Pitt cherishing similar designs. In December 1802 he said to 
Lord Malmesbury, that "if we could protract (postpone?) the evil 
of war for a few years, war would be an evil much less felt." Ajid 
again : " That if it were possible to go on without risking our power 
or safety four or five years in peace, our revenue then would be in 
such an improved state that we might without fear look in the face 
of such a war as we had just ended." Diary of Lord Malmesbury^ 
iv. 147, 157. Malta, it must be remembered, was in Pitt's eyes indis- 
pensable ; so that it seems he contemplated a renewal of the war in 
four or five years, even if Napoleon had acquiesced in our retention 
of Malta. 



190 ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 

for more in the morality of most of us than we 
should be willing to allow, he became the most for- 
midable foe to civilisation the world has seen in 
modern times, and left behind him a memory de- 
stined to an execration already general and soon to 
be universal. But let us remember with shame that 
such perfidy, tyranny, and unblushing immorality 
would never have had a chance of success, had it 
not been that anti-Bonapartism was represented by 
the selfish and odious policy of England. 

On the renewal of hostilities we resumed our for- 
mer tactics. The French, Dutch, and Spanish colonies 
were gradually recaptured. As for Spain, we did not 
wait to see what course she would pursue, but seized 
her treasure-fleet off Cadiz (Oct. 1804), without any 
declaration of war ; a proceeding which even Alison 
admits was " not warranted either by the usages of 
war or by the law of nations." Napoleon himself 
never did any thing more outrageous.* 

Pitt, now again at the helm, was unwearied in 
his efforts to organise a new coalition. Every thing 
depended on the Emperor of Russia ; and Alexander 
thought it only fair that, before Napoleon was sum- 
moned to retire from his conquests, the other Power 
that disturbed Europe should engage to leave Malta 
and consent to a revision of maritime law. Pitt, 
however, would not allow Malta to be even men- 
tioned; and it seemed doubtful whether a coalition 
could be formed, when the murder of the Duke 
d'Enghien, and the arrogant annexation of Genoa, 
precipitated matters, and Europe was once more in a 

'^ It is worth noticing, as a sign of the low morality still prevalent 
amongst us, that Lord Stanhope, though a man of moderate views, can 
see nothing improper in this act. 



ENGLAND AND TPIE SEA. 191 

flame. Xapoleon gave up his design of invading 
England, and the battle of Trafalgar, which imme- 
diately followed, completely destroyed the French 
and Spanish navies, and made England absolute mis- 
tress of the seas for the rest of the war. 

But the maritime tyranny of England had now 
become a matter of secondary importance, in face of 
the overwhelming force and monstrous projects of 
Napoleon. Russia alone remained in a condition to 
resist him. The first check his arms received was 
in the terrible winter campaign of 1806-7. Ben- 
ningsen was not to be disposed of in a day, like 
most of Napoleon's previous antagonists. With in- 
ferior nu^mbers the Eussian general fought more than 
one obstinate battle with something like success. 
Now was the time for England- to show if she was 
really at war for the liberties of Europe. Trafalgar 
had placed her in absolute security. All her forces 
were at her disposal. If a respectable army had been 
sent to assist the Swedes in Pomerania, the campaign 
must have terminated otherwise than it did.* Aus- 
tria would certainly have declared war and cut off 
Napoleon's communications, and Europe would have 
been spared eight years of fighting. But what was 
Eno^land doino:? To her eternal shame it must be 
said that she was occupied in attempts on Egypt, 
Constantinople, and the South American dominions 
of Spain. Only 10,000 men were sent to the Baltic. 
At last the Russians, outnumbered and half-starved, 
were decisively defeated at Friedland (June 1807), 
and the result was the treaty of Tilsit (June 1807). 
Furious at our treacherous desertion, Alexander re- 

* We sent 40,000 troops against Copenhagen in the autumn, when 
the Danish fleet was to be seized. 



192 ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 

verted to his early idea of subverting our maritime 
despotism, and threw himself into the arms of Na- 
poleon. 

England incurred much odium by the seizure of 
the Danish fleet (Sept. 1807). It is often spoken 
of as indefensible even by Englishmen. For once, 
however, she was acting strictly within her right. 
Our ministers were aware of a secret article in the 
treaty of Tilsit by virtue of which Denmark was to 
be required to declare war against England.* The 
readiness of Denmark to place her fleet at the dis- 
posal of France is beyond dispute ; and though such 
a feeling on her part tells a tale not creditable to 
England, yet, at the point to which things had come, 
we had a clear right to protect ourselves. 

After Trafalgar, Napoleon made no attempt to 
shake our maritime supremacy. During the last 
eight years of the war (1808-15), we addressed 
ourselves in better faith to the task of liberating 
Europe. The expulsion of the tyrant from Spain 
was the greatest service our arms have ever rendered 
to civilisation. It is gratifying to remember that it 
was effected not merely on a prudent calculation of 
expediency, but in obedience to a warm and gene- 
rous enthusiasm for an oppressed nation. 

When the great struggle of twenty- four years was 
brought to a close, France was stripped of all her ac- 
quisitions. All the other great Powers came out of 
the war bigger than they had gone into it. Russia had 
gained Finland and the largest part of the grand duchy 
of Warsaw, besides conquests in Asia. Austria had 
the Venetian territories and Salzburg to set against 

* The prevarications of M. Thiers on this point are truly con- 
temptible. 



ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 193 

Flanders. The 8,000,000 subjects of the King of 
Prussia were raised to 10,000,000 at the expense of 
Poland and. Saxony. But none had gained so much 
as England. We relinquished, it is true, many of 
our naval conquests; but we did not give back To- 
bago, St. Lucia, or the Mauritius, to France. We 
did not give back the Cape of Good Hope, Deme- 
rara, Essequibo, Berbice, or Ceylon, to the Dutch. 
We did not give back Trinidad to Spain. We kept 
Malta, the Ionian Islands, and Heligoland, the most 
valuable positions for a maritime power in Europe. 
Thus we entrenched ourselves, as it were, on both 
the routes to India, where, be it observed, our career 
of conquest had never for a moment been interrupted 
by the turmoil nearer home.* 

As far as it depends on the occupation of ports, 
our maritime empire remains as it was left by the 
war, except in the case of the Ionian Islands. If we 
have not encroached any further on our neighbours, 
neither have they disturbed us in our possessions. 
During the long peace the relative superiority of our 
navy naturally diminished in proportion as other 
nations built ships and reorganised their marines; 
and it is a moot point whether the introduction of 

* Englishmen generally believe that we magnanimously declined all 
share of the plunder; which, indeed, is the impression conveyed by most 
of our histories. Alison owns to nothing but Malta, Tobago, St. Lucia, 
and the Isle of France, and considers the treaty "glorious to England 
even more from what she abandoned than what she retained of her 
conquests." Keightley is entirely silent on our acquisitions. Miss 
Martineau not only ignores them, but boasts that "our negotiations did 
not close the war in a huckstering spirit ; they did not squabble for 
this colony or that entrepot ,- we left to others the scramble for aggran- 
disement," &c. The Pictorial History takes the bull by the horns, and 
says that we did surrender Demerara, Essequibo, and Berbice to the 
Dutch. 



194' ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 

steam lias placed them on a more equal footing with 
us. But the best proof that our ascendency is prac- 
tically unimpaired is the bitter feeling with which it 
is still notoriously regarded by the contmental na- 
tions. Let us examine, therefore, in what it consists, 
and how far it is reconcilable with justice. 

That England must necessarily be the first of 
naval powers no one will deny. Her insular position, 
the habits of a large portion of her population, her 
vast commerce, her colonies, are elements of maritime 
greatness which no other country possesses, and the 
influence they give us is perfectly legitimate. France 
can no more complain of them than we can complain 
of the territorial compactness or the large and homo- 
geneous population which make Ker the first of mili- 
tary powers. But France may create, and more than 
once has created, for herself an illegitimate mfluence 
by conquering territory that does not naturally be- 
long to her, and, even when not at war, by keeping 
on foot an army so large as to be a menace to the 
rest of Europe; and a maritime power may acquire 
an illegitimate influence by occupying posts that na- 
turally belong to other nations, and by maintaining a 
war navy in time of peace. ]SFow this is just what 
England is accused of doing. It is in the Mediterra- 
nean that our presence is most conspicuously a griev- 
ance. Partly with a view to make our influence felt 
in Southern Europe, partly because since the great 
war European questions have interested us mainly as 
they bear on our Indian empire, we think it necessary 
to be strong in the Mediterranean. We hold there 
the two most celebrated strongholds in the world. A 
fine British fleet cruises there even in time of peace. 
Our efforts are steadily directed to keep Turkey, Asia 



ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 195 

Minor, and Egypt in the hands of a weak ]30wer amen- 
able to our influence, (in pursuance of this policy 
we crushed Mehemet Ali in 1840, at the risk of a war I 
with France, and destroyed the fleets and fortresses j 
of Russia in 1854-6. We have persistently thwarted / 
an enterprise so beneficial to the world as the Suez / 
Canal, lest it should increase French influence. In 
fact a quarrel between France and England is always 
smouldering in the Levant, and may at any moment 
blaze out. 

Now to the states whose shores are washed by 
the Mediterranean the claim of a northern nation to 
hold fortresses, maintain a naval establishment, and 
parade its influence in their waters, appears unrea- 
sonable and tyrannical. Suppose Napoleon I. had 
left France a great naval power, in possession of 
Portland, of the Isle of Man, and the Aland Isles; 
suppose one French fleet permanently cruised ofi* the 
mouth of the Mersey, and another in the Baltic; 
does any one imagine that England and the Northern 
Powers would ever be brought to look on such a 
state of things as natural or tolerable ? If it dated 
from Louis XIY., would a century and a half have 
reconciled us to it ? Would a dozen treaties and 
peaces have made it sacred in our eyes? Should we 
excuse it on the ground of an extensive commerce, 
numerous colonies, or the police of the seas? Eng- 
lishmen, I think, would then understand very well 
the meaning of the phrase "maritime tyranny," which 
they now profess themselves unable to comprehend. 

Not only does England possess this overwhelming \ 
power, but she has used it, and avows her intention i 
to use it again, for objects repugnant to the humanity/ 
and civilisation of the nineteenth century. She has, 



196 ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 

indeed, consented lately to those reforms of maritime 
law which were demanded in 1780 and 1807; and 
the concession is honourable to her, inasmuch as it 
was made under no pressure but that of enlightened 
ideas, and in spite of the clamour of the Conservative 
party. But she still claims the right to capture and 
plunder merchant vessels, although every other civi- 
lised nation has called on her to efface this barbarity 
from war. It is beyond dispute that no other Power 
could pretend for a moment to resist an improvement 
of public law warmly desired by the rest of the civi- 
lised world. 

Such is the nature of our maritime ascendency. 
I have briefly sketched its rise, growth, and maturity. 
No impartial judge will deny that it has been marked 
in all its stages by flagrant violation of the simplest 
principles of morality, by contemptuous disregard of 
the rights of the weak, and by an assumption of supe- 
riority intolerably wounding to the legitimate dignity 
of our neighbours. If I am asked what is the use 
of raking up the^ misdeeds of our fathers and grand- 
fathers, when we have to deal with accomplished facts ; 
I answer, in the first place, that the most important 
fact we have to deal with is the public opinion of Eu- 
rope, which very properly views and interprets the 
present by the light of the past; and, secondly, that 
there are cases in which an offence is as fresh to-day 
as when it was newly committed — that there are 
wrongs of which the guilt accumulates till they are 
redressed. 

The average Englishman understands an illustra- 
tion better than an abstract argument. To put our 
maritime tyranny in its clearest light, to realise the 
feelings it excites in the rest of Europe, let us com- 



ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 197 

pare it with the position of France and the character 
she bears. 

France began to assume the foremost place amongst 
the Continental Powers only a few years before Eng- 
land entered on her career of maritime conquest. Eo- 
croy was the starting-point to one nation, as La Hogue 
to the other. But it was not till the invasion of 
the Spanish Netherlands in 1667 that the power of 
France began seriously to threaten the equilibrium 
of the European state system. From that time to 
the present the ambition of the French people, their 
encroachments on neio^hbourins: nations, their disre- 
gard of international right, their domineering spirit, 
their steadily growing power, have kept Europe in a 
state of chronic disquietude and alarm. If millions of 
men are withdrawn from industry, and consigned to 
the mischievous idleness of a military life, we are told 
it is to curb France. If busy towns are encumbered 
with frowning ramparts, it is to save them from French 
rapacity. If Austria is bolstered up in her felonious 
existence, it is that she may counterbalance France. 
Italy is mutilated, Poland enslaved, because England 
and Germany are jealous of France. 

Although cheerfully conceding to France that 
primacy in Europe which, resting as it does on na- 
tural and immutable conditions, no railing can take 
from her, I do not deny that she has given too much 
cause for this jealousy and distrust. The policy of 
Louis XIY. through a long reign was marked by 
violence, injustice, and perfidy. Napoleon I., with 
his still more impudent disregard of international 
morality and tendencies more consciously retrograde, 
roused for a time a storm of hatred against his coun- 
try. Still, if we place the encroachments of France 



198 ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 

side by side with those of England during the period 
I have indicated, it can hardly be denied that the lat- 
ter have been beyond comparison more extensive, 
more important, and more menacing to the common 
interest of nations. There are, indeed, truculent ped- 
ants, combining the dulness of the bookworm with 
the impertinence of the journalist, who affect to be- 
wail the cruel destiny which incorporated Lyons and 
Aries with the French monarchy. But the majority 
even of the rabid Gallophobists will not carry their 
indictment further back than the reign of Louis 
XIV. Since then the armies of France have over- 
run Europe. But what has she retained? What has 
she permanently annexed? Louis XIY., with all his 
triumphs, added to his kingdom territory which at 
the present time contains about three millions and 
a half of inhabitants. Louis XY. added Lorraine, 
which had long been practically part of France, and 
Corsica. The lawless and insolent attempt of Ger- 
many to crush the Revolution resulted in the still 
more lawless and insolent attempt of Napoleon to 
push the frontiers of France to the Elbe. But the 
treaty of Vienna restored the old boundaries, and 
convinced the French nation that conquest in Europe 
is a thing of the past. Since then we have seen the 
occupation of Algeria, which, whatever we may think 
of its morahty, is confessedly no menace to Europe, 
and the peaceable annexation of Savoy and Mce — 
that of Savoy, so natural, so expedient, so acceptable 
to the population concerned, that Europe had no pre- 
tence for objecting ; that of Mce, objectionable in 
every way, but of trifling importance as an accession 
of strength. 

The encroachments of France, therefore, during 



ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 199 

the last two hundred years have, after all, been far 
from formidable. If by virtue of her territorial com- 
pactness, her unity (without a parallel in Europe), 
her high civilisation, her capacity for organisation, 
and, above all, her emancipation from aristocracy and 
superstition (advantages of which we cannot com- 
plain, since they are for the most part equally within 
the reach of all), she has increased enormously in 
material power, it must not be forgotten that she has 
been robbed of nearly all her colonies, and has twice 
seen her navy annihilated — rerum pars altera adempta 
est — while the military establishments of her eastern 
and northern neighbours have at least kept pace with 
her own. 

If we examine the history of the other great 
Powers during the same period, we shall find that 
the encroachments of Austria, Eussia, and Prussia 
have been on a far larger scale. Those of England 
could not, from physical causes, take the shape of an 
extension of frontier ; but though on this account 
the conquests of England and France may seem to 
some extent disparate, they are undistinguishable in 
principle, and the comparison will be made, whether 
we like it or not. Many Englishmen will need to be 
reminded, and many more to be informed, that, with 
the exception of the small islands of Barbadoes and 
Jamaica, and a few others still smaller in the West 
Indies,* the whole of our enormous empire has been 
created since La Hogue. Almost all our colonies, ex- 
cept those in Australasia, are conquests from European 

^ These are the Bahamas, Bermudas, St, Kitts, Montserrat, Bar- 
buda, Nevis, Anguilla, and Tortola ; to which may be added St. Helena. 
On the coasts of Africa and India we had nothing but factories, some- 
times fortified, scattered among similar establishments of the French, 
Dutch, and Portuguese. 



200 ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 

/ Powers ; and it is evidently our maritime ascendency 
'^ which has enabled us to monopolise Australia. If we 
cannot be said to have robbed the French of India, 
it is because their title was as bad as our own. But 
it was no worse; and our empire was erected on the 
ruins of theirs., Our conquests in Europe are small 
in extent ; but their importance is out of all propor- 
tion to their size, and the bloody wars they have cost 
us prove their weight in the balance of power. 

By the aid of this historical comparison let us 
now try to place ourselves at the continental point 
of view, and contemplate the attitude of England 
towards the rest of Europe. Yes, towards the 
rest of Europe; for while France is confronted by 
more than one military Power capable of meeting 
her single-handed, and — apart from revolutionary 
complications — could not for a moment pretend 
to face a European coalition, England is not satis- 
fied unless her rulers can assure her that she is a 
match "on her own element" for all the navies of 
n;, the world put together. Is it to be expected that 
continental nations — France, for example — will re- 
gard this extravagant claim mth patience ? Will 
France listen to solemn lectures from English states- 
men and journalists on the criminality of keeping up 
an army of 400,000 men, which in case of war could 
operate on two or three points on her own frontier, 
while England demands to be in a position to rule 
the largest part of the earth's surface without a rival; 
to seal every port ; to hold every colony at her 
mercy ; to close the highway of nations and ruin 
commerce at her pleasure ; in short, to bind over the 
world in heavy securities to submissive behaviour? 
Putting aside dignity, could a regard for her own 



ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 201 

legitimate interests, or even a consideration of her 
duty to the rest of Europe, permit France to ac- 
quiesce in this outrageous claim ? Again and again has 
she sought to unite the nations in resistance to our 
maritime tyranny; and we may be assured that the 
attempt will not be relinquished. 

But England, it is said, needs a fleet, because she 
does not keep up a large standing army. Her fleet 
is not for aggression, but for defence : all she desires 
is to be absolutely safe from danger of foreign in- 
vasion ; the command of the Channel is indispensable 
to her; her vast commerce, her numerous colonies, 
must be protected. 

That there is a distinction between ao^o-ressive 
and defensive war is of course undeniable ; but where 
to draw the line is not so obvious. The navies of 
Britain have been used for the one purpose as often 
and as effectively as for the other, and would be so 
used again.* There is hardly a port in Europe 

* This is well illustrated by an episode in tlie war of the Austrian 
succession (1742), which Lord Mahon thus celebrates : " Another 
squadron of the British fleet, intrusted to Commodore Martin, sud- 
denly appeared in the Bay of Naples, and threatened an immediate 
bombardment unless the King would engage in writing to withdraw 
his troops from the Spanish army (there were 20,000 men), and to 
observe in future a strict neutrality. The Neapohtan court, wholly 
unprepared for the defence of the city, endeavoured to elude the 
demand by prolonging the negotiation; but the gallant Englishman, 
with a spirit not unworthy the Roman who drew a circle round the 
Asiatic despot, and bade him not step from it until he had made 
his decision, laid his watch upon the table in his cabin, and told the 
negotiators that their answer must be given within the space of an 
hour, or that the bombardment should begin. This proceeding, how- 
ever railed at by the diplomatists as contrary to all form and etiquette, 
produced a result such as they had seldom attained by protocols. 
Within the hour Don Carlos acquiesced in the required terms. Thus 
was the neutrality of a considerable kingdom in the contest secured 
by the sight of five British ships of the line during four- and- twenty 



202 ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 

which we liave not occupied, or plundered, or bom- 
barded. What answer is it to a Frenchman to tell 
him we do not keep an army? "Keep an army,'' 
he will say, "by all means, — as large an army as 
you please ; we are not afraid of your conquering 
us." But let us look a little further, and reflect 
what is the meaning of this claim to absolute security 
from invasion which we are in the habit of putting 
forward with such naivete. We do not renounce 
the right or disclaim the intention of going to Avar 
whenever it shall seem good to us; all we claim is 
that we shall go to war with impunity, — that we 
shall be insured in advance against the consequences. 
Who are we that we should be exempt from the pen- 
alties affixed by Nature to folly and crime, whether 
of individuals or of nations ? Even though we may 
persuade ourselves that British policy is invariably 
pure and uniformly in harmony with the best in- 
terests of Europe, is it in human nature that French- 
men should make such an admission? When Lord 
Overstone, the typical English millionaire, was giving 
evidence before a parliamentary committee, and was 
asked what would be the effect of a French occu- 
pation of London, he replied, — and the reply has 
become famous, — " I cannot contemplate or trace to 
its consequences such a supposition. My only answer 
is, It must not be." Has not a Frenchman as good 
a right to say the same of Paris ? And if he thinks 
a million of soldiers are necessary to give him his 
absolute guarantee, with what face could Lord Over- 
stone object to the French army being doubled? 

hours ; for their number was but such, and no longer time elapsed 
between their first appearance and their final departure from the bay." 
History of England^ iii. 130. 



ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 203 

The truth is, that, whether for France or England, 
such a pretension is opposed to the interest of man- 
kind. It is impossible to say of any individual, nor 
can any individual say mth certainty of himself, how 
far his conduct is determined by the fear of conse- 
quences. We have no analysis subtle enough for 
such an inquiry. But in the field of international 
morality, where the limits of right and wrong are 
unfortunately still so loosely defined, and where the 
infamy of iniquitous conduct is distributed among so 
many individuals that its weight to each is infinitesi- 
mal, the dread of consequences is at present the chief 
security for fair dealing. No true patriot, therefore, 
would desire his country to be invulnerable. He 
would dread for her this gift, fatal as the ring of 
Gyges. The true glory of a country, as of an indi- 
vidual, lies not in wealth and strength, but in equity, 
in moderation, in nobleness of temper ; and whatever 
may have been the case in the past, it is now happily 
very clear that a nation which walks blamelessly be- 
fore Europe may also walk securely; a fact worth 
noting by those who are tempted to doubt the moral 
progress of society.* 

As the charge of want of patriotism will be 
noisily urged against all who endeavour to establish 
purer principles of international morality, it may be 
well to examine the meaning of that much-abused 
word and the history of the idea it represents. Pa- 
triotism, as the dictionary mil tell us, means love 
of country. It is too hastily assumed that love of 
country is an absolute and unmixed virtue. It is 

'"' To anticipate cavil, I may state that I have always rejoiced in the 
liberation of Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark, as I would in that of 
Yenetia from Austria. 



204 ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 

a virtue as opposed to love of self, but not as op- 
posed to love of the race. For it is clear that the 
love we feel for our country is itself not without a 
mixture of selfishness, which cannot be eliminated. 
No one would hesitate to say that love of country is 
to be ranked higher in the scale of virtue than love 
of our nearest relations ; the reason evidently being 
that the selfish alloy enters more largely into the 
latter than into the former. 

Love of country, then, is laudable because and 
in so far as it involves a sacrifice of our selfish 
instincts. From a variety of causes there is not, 
and cannot be, the same conflict between selfishness 
and patriotism in the citizens of most modern Euro- 
pean states as in the republics of antiquity. The 
relation of the individual citizen to the state is much 
less close and personal. The Athenian felt that the 
greatness and even the existence of his country de- 
pended appreciably on the conduct of himself, his 
friends, and acquaintances. Giving his vote for war 
meant exposing himself to the chance, and the not 
remote chance, of having to leave his business, don 
his fighting gear, and march to the border, or per- 
haps of being told oiF for service of many months 
at Memphis or Potidsea. If he had only to mount 
guard on the long walls two nights out of three, he 
was a lucky man. If he fell into the hands of the 
enemy, it was not to be exchanged or "paroled,'' 
but more frequently to be despatched on the spot. 
If his city was taken, he would probably be turned 
over to the executioner, and his wife and children to 
the slave- dealer. 

Now when the English Government, with the ap- 
probation of the country, declared war against Kussia 



ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 205 

in 1854, we knew very well that it would make no 
difference to any of us personally. City men went 
in to their business as usual. Country gentlemen 
killed time and partridges neither more nor less 
sedulously. Eural skittle-grounds and metropolitan 
gin-palaces did a fair average business. I never 
heard that Pali-Mall looked empty or that Lombard 
Street was less thronged, or even that things were 
flatter in Petticoat Lane. The 22,000 red-coats who 
perished by the sword of the enemy or the arrange- 
ments of the War-OfE.ce, were not missed out of a 
population of 27,000,000. Certainly the Russians 
did not manage to put in mourning a single family 
that I was accjuainted with. There was the war 
ninepence, it is true, and we did not like to pay it. 
But will any one who reads these pages say that it 
curtailed one of his comforts or even of his luxuries ? 
As for apprehensions of having the horrors of war 
brought home to us, of seeing hostile ships off our 
coast or hostile troops on our soil, it is needless to 
say that they never occurred to any one. 

To talk of patriotism under such circumstances is 
simple nonsense. It may be safely said that during 
the last half- century no Englishmen have had an 
opportunity of showing their patriotism, except per- 
haps the builders of the Alabama, and they did not 
avail themselves of it.* Patriotism is now only a 
specious name for national insolence. To an English- 
man his country is not something for which he is to 
sacrifice his personal interests, but something which 

^' I do not forget the many instances of devotion shown by our 
soldiers, whether in the Crimea or in India. But in a modern army, 
except when fighting against an invader or in a civil war, patriotic 
feeling is enthely superseded by professional ardour, loyalty to the 
regimental colours, or motives yet narrower. 



206 ENGLAM) AND THE SEA. 

promotes them. His associations with it are entirely 
of an agreeable kind. They turn exclusively on 
material advantage. He does not, indeed, own to 
himself that the ennobling elements of patriotism, 
such as sacrifice, fidelity, loyalty, duty, are practi- 
cally obsolete. On the contrary, he gives himself 
credit for all those qualities as a matter of course. 
Patriotism has always ranked as one of the noblest 
virtues. When he rejoices over the capture of Pekin. 
or the establishment of compulsory trade with Japan, 
he is a patriot. The inference is obvious and comfort- 
able. In reality his feelings towards his country are 
neither more nor less elevated than those of a share- 
holder in a prosperous joint-stock company towards 
the concern in which he has been lucky enough to 
invest his money. 

It is not for a moment suggested that the genuine 
virtues which the love of country once evoked would 
not be manifested quite as generally as they ever were, 
should occasion arise for their exercise. Our time is 
as rich as any in glowing examples of fortitude, self- 
sacrifice, and devotion to duty. If those virtues have 
not marked our patriotism, it is because our country 
has not needed them. Still less is it intended to im- 
ply that love of country is not a healthy and admir- 
able sentiment, even where it does not make any de- 
mands on our devotion. Just as we should be unable 
even to conceive the good of our neighbour, if we 
were absolutely free from selfish propensities our- 
selves, so the welfare of communities must be the 
guide to and the measure of the welfare of the race. 
Moreover, the large majority of mankind are so con- 
stituted, or at all events so educated, that love for the 
race must be to them a somewhat vague sentiment, 



ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 207 

wanting in precision and directness, and all but use- 
less as a guide to practical life. Love of country is 
for them the best and only possible substitute for uni- 
versal benevolence. It may well be doubted, indeed, 
whether countries such as France and England, repre- 
senting thirty or forty millions of inhabitants, are not 
aggregates too extensive to be of much use from this 
point of view. Certainly no one who is at once ac- 
quainted with ancient history and a candid observer 
of modern society will deny that the intensity of pa- 
triotic feeling varies inversely as the size of the com- 
munity. If patriotism was too narrow and absorbing 
at Athens, in England is it not too vague and diluted 
a sentiment? 

I do not propose to argue with those, if any such 
there be, who deny altogether the existence of any 
principles of international right, and maintain that a 
nation is not bound to act by any other rule than 
that of its interests, real or supposed. Few, if any, 
will be found to state their opinions in so logical and 
revolting a manner. Probably even Mr. Roebuck 
has sorae fig-leaf of morality that satisfies his ideas of 
decency. But many will be far from contented with 
the point of view that has been adopted through this 
discussion. " We have heard," they will say, " a 
great deal about the interests of Europe and man- 
kind ; but have we no duty to ourselves ? Are we, 
alone of nations, to attend to these Quixotic notions, 
and make ourselves an easy prey to our neighbours ? 
Are we to surrender Malta and Gibraltar, sell off our 
fleet, give up Jamaica to the Spaniards, South Africa 
to the Dutch, and Canada to the French, in the inno- 
cent expectation that other Powers will follow our 
example, and eiiyj us nothing but the glory of our 



208 ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 

initiative ? Fortunately we are a practical people, 
and choose for our rulers practical statesmen, not 
sentimental theorists." 

If there is one principle we set more store by 
than another, it is that of the separation between 
the theoretical and practical functions, or, as we call 
them when speaking of the Middle Ages, the spiritual 
and temporal powers.* This principle is the indis- 
jDensable condition of an orderly and progressive state 
of society. Let England, therefore, by all means, 
continue to be governed by practical men. But it is 
essential to good government that these men should 
understand and recognise the true ideal, that they 
should keep the right azoicog before their eyes. To 
ascertain tliat is the business of the theorist. It is for 
the practical statesman to apply the principles which 
theory has established ; to decide the how, the when, 
and the how far. 

It does not follow because England has been pur- 
suing an indefensible policy, that she should therefore 
set herself to undo m a day the work of two centu- 
ries. The National Gallery is an ugly building. But 
we do not blow it up as soon as we make the disco- 
very, without waiting even till the pictures can be 

^- The office of the sph'itual power is to reason, to advise, to praise, 
to blame ; never to govern. This function was fulfilled, and on the 
whole worthily, by the Church in its best days. In the absence of any 
organisation adapted to exercise it, it is now vested chiefly in the igno- 
rant and unprincipled litterateurs who, without even the guarantee of 
their names, guide public opinion through the press. That the influence 
of the public journals is not one of unmixed evil is mainly owing to 
the fact that they are compelled occasionally to give publicity to the 
speeches and letters of wise and good men. A speech of Mr. Bright 
or a letter of Mr. Mill, appearing in the Tirnes^ disinfects, as it were, a 
vast mass of leading articles. The direct influence of books on public 
opinion is comparatively small, because they appeal to a sm.all class of 
readers. 



ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 209 

got out of it. We must discriminate and classify. 
Some of our iniquities have become, as it were, obso- 
lete. Guilt is no longer accruing. There was a time, 
for instance, when it was our duty to surrender the 
Cape to Holland. That time has passed. The Cape 
is now to all intents an English colony. The descend- 
ants of the Dutch settlers have no desire for change. 
The same may be said of Canada, and perhaps of all 
the colonies we have conquered. The case of India 
is quite different. Justice requires that we should 
recognise the duty of withdrawing from India, and 
shape our policy towards that end. But it is ob- 
^dous that to withdraw within the next twelve months 
would be a crime hardly less atrocious than our ori- 
ginal conquest. And so, when we have recognised 
,the criminality of maintaining an enormous navy and 
occupying our Mediterranean fortresses, it still re- 
mains to be considered how and when we are to re- 
duce the one and surrender the others. Unquestion- 
ably also we have a duty to ourselves. Suicide can 
no more be the duty of a nation than of an individual. 
Only let it be remembered that the life and independ- 
ence of a nation is one thing ; its glory and power 
another. If it could be shown that the surrender of 
Gibraltar would be followed, say, by the partition of 
England between France and Spain, we should clearly 
be justified in protecting our independence, even by 
so strong a measure as holding Gibraltar. But if no 
more is asserted than that the occupation of that for- 
tress is necessary to our maritime power or our com- 
merce, we are nonsuited at once ; for Spain has more 
right to one of her own towns than we have to a 
powerful navy, or an extensive commerce. 

Putting aside hypothesis, let us take the actual 

p 



210 ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 

case of Malta. Wc acquired tliat island iniquitously. 
Our occupation of it affords legitimate ground of 
complaint to all the Mediterranean Powers, especially 
to Italy. But I am not aware that the Maltese are 
averse to our ride. Italy will not trouble herself 
about Malta while she has far more serious grievances 
to complain of In fact, it suits her at present to 
have a British fleet within call. We perform some 
service in keeping down piracy. Lastly, since we 
cannot make all our sacrifices at once, we must post- 
pone those which arc less urgently required. The 
time will come when the public opinion of Europe 
will insist on our leaving Malta. But, perhaps, it will 
be found more equitable and expedient to make it an 
international police-station for the Mediterranean than 
to annex it to It.aly. Of course, no violence must be 
done to the inclinations of the Maltese.* 

There remains Gibraltar. Here there is no room 
for doubt as to our duty. Gibraltar should be sur- 
rendered at once to Spain. We acquired it at the 
expense of our honour; we have retained it in vio- 
lation of our word. But enough of the past. We 
may make restitution ; reparation is out of our power. 
Is it possible that Englishmen with a spark of can- 
dour and generosity can disguise from themselves 
the monstrous outrage we are committing every day 
that our occupation continues? Let us have recourse 

* Where there is a native population, its wishes must always out- 
weigh every other consideration. It is much to be regretted that the 
Channel Islands did not go with Normandy. But the inhabitants, as is 
well knovv'ii, ablior the idea of union with France ; so there is no more 
to be said. The Jews, smugglers, and vagabonds whom our flag attracts 
to Gibraltar, scntina gentium^ cannot be called a native population. Au- 
guste Comte prescribes to France the abandonment, not only of Alge- 
ria, but of Corsica. Unquestionably he would have protested against 
the annexation of Nice. 



ENGLAND xVND THE SEA. 211 

once more to illustration. Suppose the French held 
Portland. Suppose that they had surrounded it 
with impregnable fortifications ; that it was crowded 
with French regiments ; that a French squadron lay 
at anchor in the bay ; that we were forbidden to 
raise counter-fortifications at Weymouth on pain of 
a cannonade from the fortress;* that the island was 
a nest of smuggler sf and a sanctuary for our poli- 
tical offenders, J — should we not feel this to be a 
oTievous outrao'e and humiliation ? should we not 
consider it a casus belli? should we not rush to arms 
as often as an opportunity seemed to off'er for wiping 
out our shame? And we should be right. Patriot- 
ism supposes, not only a people, but a definite geo- 
graphical circumscription. The word is plainly in- 
applicable to the esprit de corps of a nomad tribe. 
That " country" which we all of us love is a complex 
idea. It is not equivalent to all living Englishmen, 
nor even to all Englishmen past, present, and to 
come. It is an abstraction made from them plim 
the island we dwell in. Now to countries whose 
boundaries are not sharply and unalterably marked 
by nature, a curtailment of frontier does not neces- 
sarily bring an inconsolable grief. The amputation 
is painful; the wound may bleed long, — but it may 
heal at last. Germany has forgotten Alsace ; Italy 
-will be comforted for Nice; but when a coast is the 



* We availed ourselves of the Peninsular war to destroy the 
Spanish forts. WTien the Spaniards were about to rebuild them after 
the war, the British governor gave notice that he would open fire if 
the works were begun. 

f British manufactures are poured in enormous quantities into 
Gibraltar, to be smuggled into the interior. See ApricndLc. 

% " Gibraltar," says Mr. Ford, " has been made the hotbed of revo- 
lutionists of all kinds." 



212 ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 

frontier the case is altogether different. To seize a 
point on your neighbour's coast is not to amputate 
a finger or an arm, — it is to plunge the knife into 
his flesh and keep it there. Every time he stirs, his 
anguish is renewed. Observe, too, that the smaller 
the space of territory occupied, the greater and more 
permanent the irritation. If France conquered Scot- 
land, and succeeded gradually in reconciling the 
Scotch to the change, the time would come when 
England would acquiesce, and the entente cordiale 
might again subsist between the two countries. But 
France might hold Portland for centuries, and we 
should never cease to writhe. 

And Spain has never forgotten Gibraltar. To 
lose it was her misfortune ; to forget it would be her 
disgrace. Even in the lowest depth of her misery, 
when she seemed to be expiring as a nation, that 
last sign of sensation remained ; the anguish of that 
wound was not deadened ; and the bitterest of her 
regrets was that she could not sitrike a blow for 
Gibraltar* — 

" Semianimesque micant digiti, ferrumque retractant." 



* Mr. Ford, wlio wrote when Spain was at the lowest ebb, and who, 
it may be observed, never loses an opportunity for dwelling with brutal 
exultation on her humiliation by England, says : " The foreigner's 
possession of that angulus rankles deeply, as well it may. In the 
tenacious memory of Spain, which never forgets or forgives, it is hardly 
yet ^ fait accompW'' (p. 152). "The descendants of the expelled 
fortress linger near the gates of their former paradise, now, alas ! in 
the UmjpoTary occupation of heretics, since they indulge in a long- 
deferred hope of return. Even yet our possession of the Reck is not 
quite a fait accompli^ and the King of the Spains still calls himself 
the King of Gibraltar ; of which the alcaldes of San Eoque in their 
ofl&cial documents designate themselves the authorities, and all persons 
born on the Rock are entitled to the rights of native Spanish subjects" 
(p. 268). " It is a bridle in the mouth of Spain and Barbary. It 
speaks a language of power which alone is understood and obeyed by 



ENGLAND A^-D THE SEA. 213 

That crisis of her fate is past. Her strength returns. 
Her eve brightens again : and Tvhither does it turn ? 
An English statesman, who has had peculiar oppor- 
tunity for judging, says. I am told, that no Spaniard 
lies down at nio:ht without thinking of Gibraltar. 

Xow, will any one who honestly believes that 
there is such a thing as right, and that justice, gene- 
rosity', and mercy are the virbaes of States, as of 
individuals. — ^will any such person venture to assert 
that in inflicting this cruel and prolonged torture on 
Spain we are not committing an atrocious crime? 
I am not talking to Mr. Roebuck or ^Ir. Carlyle, but 
to the thousands of Englishmen who have freely cen- 
sured Austria for acting wrongly by Italy, and Rus- 
sia for acting wrongly by Poland ; who can perfectly 
comprehend how the French occupation of Rome is 
a cruel outrage on the whole Italian nation, quite 
apart from the wrong done to the citizens of Rome 
itself. You who read this page, how often have you 
given vent to your noble indignation agaiost Xapo- 
leon for keeping his army at Rome ! And you tell 
me that England is justified in holding Gibraltar? 
Do you not feel the blood creeping into your fore- 
head ? Does it not occur to you that if English hy- 
pocrisy is proverbial on the Continent, it is because 
there are so manv Englishmen like vou? Do vou 



those cognate nadons. Th.e Spaniards never kne^r tlie valne of tMg 
natnral fortress niiiil its loss, which wonnds their national pride, and 
led Bonaparte, when he found he could not taJz^ it. to sav thai, while 
it opened nothing and shut nothing, onr possession of Gibraltar 
aecuped for France Spain's hatred of England" (p. 273). — It is im- 
posaUe to open ilr. Ford's Handbook any where withont lighting on 
some stnpid Cockney insnlt to Spain or France. For braggadocio and 
falsifMation of history it surpasses eTen 31. Thiers, The English is 
that of a washerwuiusDj as may be seen in the above extracts. 



214 ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 

not begin with some misgivings to analyse tlie mo- 
tives vfliich prevent you from stealing half-a-crown ? 
A little sincerity and honesty in mdividual citi- 
zens — that is what we come back to, after all. Gladly 
do I recognise signs that a purer public opinion on 
the questions here discussed is silently growing up. 
There are many who feel ashamed of our conduct to 
Spain. Spahi is rapidly rising again to the rank of 
a great Power. Though our blustering journalists 
find their account m strokmg the national pride and 
swaggering about "the key of the Mediterranean,". 
our statesmen, cooler and better informed, know that 
next time Spain, backed by France, claims Gibraltar, 
she must have it. Time was when the English 
people would have fought Europe ^ye^ ten, or twenty 
years, rather than give up the cherished symbol of 
our maritime power. Never was England so strong 
as she is this clay. But she fights no more for Old- 
World ideas. Those days are gone by, and our states- 
men know it. It remains to be seen whether they 
mil have the wisdom and firmness to anticipate an 
appeal to force, which would only end in the humi- 
liation of England. Some clamour there would be, 
no doubt, but less than is generally thought. Most 
people would take it quietly, and, after the first feel- 
ing of annoyance was past, would not be insensible 
to the glory of the act. A ministry with a good 
working majority m the House would risk nothing 
by the step. The cession of the Ionian Islands is a 
case in point. We had spent large sums on the for- 
tification of Corfu. We had flogged and hung dis- 
affected lonians, while our newspapers were weeping 
over the woes of Yenice. Once or twice a-year the 
Times used to trample on the lonians. Only a few 



ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 215 

months before the nitencled cession was announced, 
I remember reading one of these insolent and odious 
invectives. Our modern Cleon scoffingly declined 
to argue the question on its merits. " We may as 
well declare at once that England has no thought of 
abandoning her transmarine possessions." The step 
was probably already decided in the councils of the 
Ministry when these words were written. To the 
surprise of every one, the country acquiesced in it 
^^T.th hardly a murmur. The moral effect was great 
in Europe, and would have been much greater if 
we had not done the thino^ in the most ung-racious 
manner possible ; blowing up the fortifications of 
Corfu, and making the cession conditional upon the 
adoption by Greece of an absurd form of govern- 
ment.* 

Although not a millionaire or a journalist, I love 
the country in which I was born, and with which my 
existence is bound up. ^ttcc^tccv IXa^pv. I know the 
value of my birthright. It is because I wish that 
Europe should admire and reverence England that 
I would have her cover herself with glory of the 
purest kind by the voluntary surrender of Gibraltar. 
If we wait till it is formally claimed under penalty of 
war, the grace of the action is gone ; and whether we 
struck a blow for it or not, we mis^ht trust a T^Tiis: 
Ministry, with one eye fixed on the Times and the 
other on the Opposition, for stumbling to the inevit- 
able -^vith a due regard to ignominy. But if the 
sacrifice were made spontaneous^, heartily, grace- 
fully, which of us would not feel the pure happiness 

* The 2Ioniteur of September 6, 1865, with somewhat tardy justice, 
recognises the cession of the Ionian Islands as a xjendant to the French 
liberation of Lombardy in 1859. 



216 ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 

that follows on a noble deed ? Which of us would 
not hold his head higher? Alas, I fear we shall have 
to delve mto a new stratum of society for our states- 
men before such an act will be done in such a spirit. 

The time is not far distant when England will 
cease to be in material strength the foremost mem- 
ber of the Anglo-Saxon race. Most of us will live to 
see the United States with a population double that 
of our own islands, overflowing with wealth, exempt 
from most of the economic diinculties that embarrass 
an old country, and enjoying equally with ourselves 
all the advantages of modern civilisation. I say no- 
thing of their emancipation from hereditary institu- 
tions, because that will not be unanimously admitted 
as an element of superiority. But that their material 
force will be vastly greater than our own, no one in 
his sober senses will deny. Already our most for- 
midable rivals on the sea, in a few years they must 
inevitably overshadow us. And yet Englishmen, 
professing to respect their country, are content to 
rest her claim to be considered great on this material 
superiority, which nature herself is rapidly transfer- 
ring to another nation ! Even if it be granted, as 
some fire-eaters, embittered by recent events, will 
suggest, that England will ally herself with other 
European Powers to check America, it is clear that 
an indispensable preliminary to such an alliance 
would be the abandonment of our pretensions to a 
maritime supremacy. Spain will never take our hand 
cordially while we keep Gibraltar; nor is any future 
government of France likely to tread in the steps of 
Dubois and Fleury. 

Great England cannot fail to be if she accepts her 
true position. She contains within herself the ele- 



ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 217 

ments of a loftier grandeur than the widest-reaching 
empire could confer on her — enormous wealth, inex- 
haustible resources, an admirable geographical posi- 
tion, a population of thirty millions, brave, enter- 
prising, and, when educated, intelligent; a tradition 
of order and legality. But these natural advantages 
are but half cultivated. Wealth is distributed with 
glaring and growing inequality. Land is yearly pass- 
ing into the hands of a smaller number of proprietors. 
An organised war is declaring itself between capital 
and labour. The upper and middle classes refuse a 
system of national education. Our infanticide, the 
result of misery and immorality, is a scandal in 
Europe.* In place of a generally-accepted religion, 
we have superstition in one sex and hypocrisy in the 
other. While Ireland is disaffected, we cannot be 
said even to have estabhshed our unity. If we wish 
to develop our national greatness in a legitimate 
way, let us set to work and correct these frightful 
evils. It is true that greatness of this kind involves 
sacrifices and reforms displeasing to the wealthy 
classes, while a greatness based on conquest demands 
nothing but the blood and money of the masses, 
and actually embellishes the position of the rich.f 
This consideration points to the agency by which the 
progress of England to a higher stage of civilisation 
and a more solid grandeur than she has yet known 
is to be accomplished. 

* Dr. Lankester, one of the coroners for Middlesex, has shown 
that one woman in thirty in London is a murderess. The proportion 
may be larger, but cannot be less. 

f The burden of taxation, arrange it how you will, must faU 
mainly on the industrial class. In England we make special arrange- 
ments for transferring it from the rich to the poor, by raising consi- 
derably more than half our revenue from six of the commonest articles 
of consumption. 



218 ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 

The aristocracy and the bourgeoisie^ actmg from 
difFerent motives and in different ways, are alike 
responsible for our foreign policy. The industrial 
class, although its ignorance has sometimes made it 
the tool of parties, cannot fairly be charged with any 
portion of the national guilt and folly. The wealth, 
greatness, and glory of England have meant very 
little for the working-man.* Rather, they have ad- 
journed his emancipation. It is his interest' — and it 
cannot be much longer concealed from him — that 
public attention should be concentrated on the state 
of England. The recasting of our constitution, the re- 
distribution of taxation, the substitution of a system of 
education for a State Church, the limitation of proprie- 
tary rights in land, poor-law reform, sanitary reform, 
legal reform ; in a word, the subordination of private 
interests to public utility; — these are questions that 
cannot be dealt with even by public opinion, while 
our energies and attention are wasted on the manage- 
ment of two hundred millions of people who do not 
belong to us. The direct, though not continuous, 
intervention of working-men in the government of 
the country will be signalised by a refusal to let it 
be encumbered any longer with this millstone of an 
empire. To the working-man it is of little conse- 
quence whether the Union Jack flies at Gibraltar, 
Quebec, and Calcutta, but of infinitely great import- 
ance that he have a fair share of the profits of pro- 
duction; that the necessaries and comforts of life be 
within his reach ; that poison be not infused into the 

* Malthus {Principles of Political Economy^ p. 279) calculated that 
1720-1755 was the period during which the British labourer had en- 
joyed the greatest comfort. Our glorious imperial policy was first 
inaugurated in its systematic shape in 1756, when the great Pitt came 
into power. The coincidence, we may be sure, is not accidental. 



ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 219 

air he breathes and the water he clrmks ; that rational 
education be provided for his children ; and that his 
legitimate dignity be not wounded by institutions, 
designed to consecrate and perpetuate social ine- 
quality. The present generation must make up its 
mind to see these questions raised, and the next, 
probably, to see them settled. Some two generations 
have passed since Burke complained that the age of 
chivalry was gone; and soon some bourgeois orator 
will be lamenting: that the asre of broadcloth has so 
quickly followed it. Periods of transition are na- 
turally transient. 

I have studiously forborne in this discussion from 
considering the interests of England apart from those 
of humanity, from taking any other than a moral 
ground. The arguments by which Mr. Cobden and 
Mr. Bright, in their speeches and writings on inter- 
national relations and maritime law, have advocated 
somewhat similar conclusions, are based mainly on 
other considerations. It has been their object to 
show that the pretensions of England and the bar- 
barous maxims she still upholds are pregnant with 
fatal consequences to her national and commercial 
greatness. No clear-headed and unprejudiced person 
will dispute the soundness of their arguments ; and 
it has perhaps seemed to those eminent and admir- 
able statesmen that such a method of dealing with 
the subject was best adapted to convince the English 
nation. For my part, I believe that public opinion, 
after all, can only be acted upon to any purpose by 
appealing to moral principles. The abrogation of 
this or that law, the discontinuance of this or that 
usage, would be of little value unless the spirit of 
our policy and the tone of public feeling were the- 



220 ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 

roughly regenerated ; a result which can be attained 
only by moral means. 

It is here that the lamentable absence of any 
recognised canon of morality with a competent 
organ of interpretation is most sorely felt. In the 
much-misunderstood Middle Ages society was not 
left without such direction. There was a criterion 
of truth implicitly accepted by all the Western 
nations. The weakness of its objective basis did not 
detract from its value so long as its deficiency in 
that respect was unnoticed. The moral precepts 
grounded upon it were, for the time, admirable, and 
there was a spiritual authority side by side with the 
temporal, to interpret, to counsel, and to reprove. 
But the unreal foundation of that noble fabric has 
crumbled away under the attacks of science; and 
morals are left without shape or system, with no de- 
finite sanction, no criterion to which all are content 
to appeal. In place of a Universal Church, devoting 
its energies to the sublime task of controlling the 
selfish instincts and promoting practical morality, we 
have now a melee of rival quacks deafening us with a 
discordant jargon, which to educated men means no- 
thing. What wonder if we stop our ears, — some with 
business, some with intellectual pursuits, some with 
pleasure? So-called churches, which have absolutely 
nothing to tell us on any of the important questions 
of the day, which are no longer ahead or even abreast 
of the secular world in their moral teaching and dis- 
cipline, have lost their raison dCetre. Secure in the 
afi'ections of the uneducated majority, they may long 
afford to ignore the timid and tortuous sap of the 
savant who has nothing to substitute for what he is 
undermining. But there is a rivalry they cannot 



ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 221 

disregard. Whatever a clergy may think, no reli- 
gious organisation can long hold its ground in popu- 
lar esteem when confronted by a loftier morality than 
its own. Either it must prove its expansive force 
by adapting itself heartily to the higher standard, or 
it will fall as Polytheism fell before Christianity, as 
Eastern Christianity before Islam, condemned by the 
heart even more energetically than by the intellect. 

EDWAKD SPENCER BEESLY. 



Appendix. 

Li 1853 a deputation of merchants and inhabitants of 
Gibraltar addressed a letter to the Duke of ISTewcastle, then 
Colonial Secretary, which throws a curious light on the cha- 
racter of the Gibraltar trade. It appears that the Governor, 
Sir R. Gardiner, had been exerting himself to supj^ress smug- 
gling, and in answer to a remonstrance of the mercantile 
community had expressed himself as foUows : " If you can 
only uphold a pretence of trade at Gibraltar by making it 
a mart for contraband goods to be smuggled into Spain, the 
fortress had better be divested of trade altogether. It had 
better become an honest fishing port than a smuggling mart 
— a j)erpetual thorn in the side of Spain, and a cause of 
international recriminative feud between the two nations, 
preventing all sound intercourse or relations either of politi- 
cal or commercial alliance. The frequency of your attempted 
interference in the military government of the fortress, mak- 
ing it, if you could, quite secondary to the unshackled pursuits 
of smuggling, shows to what a fearful depth the smuggling 
trade of Gibraltar has sapped the military caste of this for- 
tress, no less than engendered the vice and crime so justly 
associated with smuggling in the eyes of all nations. The 



222 ENGLAND AND THE SEA. 

decline of the Gibraltar trade is but a consequence of its own 
innate moral turpitude." 

Upon this language and the measures of the Governor 
the deputation comment with a naivete which is truly amus- 
ing. His orders, they say, " have been issued in the pursuit 
of an impracticable policy, which he describes as ' licit trade 
free as air,' which, however, in reality is fettered by the 
Spanish laws with wholly prohibitory duties as regards British 
goods." They complain of his refusal to grant a Mediter- 
ranean pass to a vessel unless the owner ^^ previously gave 
secm'ity in the bond of two respectable persons that the vessel 
should not be employed in the contraband trade ; that is to say, 
in the trade which may be prohibited by the fiscal laws of 
Spain." One wonders how these gentlemen would define 
contraband trade. " We detect," they go on to say, " in 
all these proceedings of the Governor proofs of his deliberate 
and avowed design to injure the trade of the port, constituting 
himself the protector of the revenues of the Crown of Spain, 
and foro-ettinc; that he ouo^ht to be the cruardian of English 
commerce. * * * * "V^^e wiU not affect to conceal the 
notorious fact that Manchester-manufactured goods are ex- 
tensively smuggled into Spain. * * * * It is quite an 
abuse of terms and at variance with the fact to describe the 
trade of Gibraltar in the way the Governor denomices it, as 
^a contraband trade.' The business of a merchant in Gibral- 
tar is completed when he has effected the sale of his goods in 
open market. These goods are mostly of British manufac- 
ture, consigned to him by English merchants, men of un- 
blemished integrity, * * * * ^ British merchant ought 
not to be dictated to as to the place where he shall reside. 
The Queen's dominions are happily free to all her subjects ; 
a merchant resorts to that spot best adapted for his interests 
or his connections ; and the merchants of Gibraltar, reposing 
under the shadow of English law, may well disregard the 
unmeaning observations, &c. &c." 

I have let Sir Robert Gardiner and his victims speak for 
themselves. No comment of mine is needed. 



No. ly. 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 



E. H. PEMBEK 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 



I. 

Along with the growth of a sense of duty among 
the western nations of Europe is slackened or quick- 
ened the progress of the world. We claim to be no 
more than what we are, — at the head of the human 
race; and it is vital to the universal interest that 
we should acknowledge the full meaning of our 
preeminence. To feel a noble exultation, not in 
the privileges, but in the responsibilities of power; 
to replace a reckless and anarchical acquisitiveness 
by the more orderly and just hopes of an unsel- 
fish communion; to rise from the level of Cortez 
and Pizarro, to do far more even for the wealth of 
Europe than they did, while we educate and retain 
the races and systems which it was the cynical boast 
of the disciples of that bad old school that they im- 
proved by extirpation; to- lay aside direct self-inter- 
est; to forego rights for duties; to appeal for com- 
panionship to less advanced societies, more nobly and 
more effectively than by brute force and obstinate 
high-handedness; to hivite, not to terrify; to repair 

Q 



226 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

the misdeeds of the past, and to beat back its tradi- 
tions of evil-doing from the future ; to universalise 
European ideas, and to unify civilisation, if that be to 
be done, by giving to our physical and scientific supe- 
riority the sanction of moral order and restraint; — 
such are some of the resolves which the mind of West- 
ern Europe should learn to form as it contemplates its 
OAvn position, and what it has done and what it may 
yet do over the outer area of the world. 

The self-confidence of race is majestic, but the 
egoism of race is contemptible, and the step that 
leads from one to the other is perilously short. The 
first assumes primacy and dispenses blessing; the se- 
cond arrogates empire, begetting vice and inflicting 
evil. We must not fail to distinguish these two ideas. 
It has been empire hitherto that Europe has sought, 
and it has been in the struggle for empire that her 
states have vied with each other beyond her bounds. 
Primacy is as unconsciously conceded as it is indi- 
rectly attained, and elevates alike those who claim 
and those who acknowledge it; but empire is the 
mere gain of lust, and debases both sides with a dis- 
astrous reciprocity. 

It is a significant and satisfactory distinction be- 
tween this age and its predecessors that we no longer 
preach conquest. It is something to have gone so far. 
But, being there, why should we pause ? Are we to 
confess that we find the mask of a virtuous change 
more profitable than the old barefaced iniquity, and 
that we fear the awakening of our ov/n conscience just 
enough to seek to lull it by phrases of amendment, 
and philosophic pretexts for what pays us well — 
phrases and pretexts that apologise even for conquest, 
though only when under a new name and garb ? Are 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 227 

we to go still, as we ever have gone, to the East, with 
no antecedent theory of its civilisation, and predeter- 
mined to receive none ? Are we stiLl to have no 
mission but merchandise, with its tributaries, geogra- 
phical science, religious propagandism, and political 
intrigue ? Is Asia, in our eyes, still to be a gold-field, 
and we the discoverers and diggers in it? Are the 
defkcement and ruin of its surface still to be of no 
consequence to us so long as we are enriched? With 
by far the largest section of our populations, it is to 
be feared that this is so. The pretence, indeed, of a 
higher aim has lately been found valuable to our mer- 
cantile classes, in proportion as it has become neces- 
sary to excite our rulers and peoples at home to state 
efforts, which the grandeur of modern commercial 
ambition has made vital to its own accomplishment. 
But beyond the adoption of this new weapon, among 
such men there has been no change. It is still pride 
and greed, greed and pride, only in alliance with the 
most stupendous power, and overlain with the most 
magnificent pretence. 

All who would rightly understand the state of this 
Asiatic question must regard our position in India, 
China, and Japan respectively, as forming points in 
an orderly series. Except its enlarged scale, and the 
greater admixture of imperial action in it, our intru- 
sion into Japan at this moment is what it was in India 
in the days of Jehangir; and similarly, our position 
at the treaty ports of China is very like what it was 
in India towards the close of the epoch of the Facto- 
ries. If we were to adapt, as we have hitherto done, 
to the conditions of the Chinese Empire the policy we 
pursued in India, we should end by conquering the 
country, unless we annihilated our European exist- 



228 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

ence before we completed the achievement. So, if we 
go on as we have begun in Japan, that empire, though 
the task would probably be still tougher than in 
China, would follow the fate of the two earlier victims. 
The India of yesterday is the China of to-day, and the 
China of to-day the Japan of to-morrow. The pro- 
gression is the inevitable sequence of our conduct up 
to this point. We conquered India by forcing a trade, 
and we cannot force a trade elsewhere without con- 
quest too. 

But side by side with this mercantile perseverance 
there is, as I said before, the promise of a change. 
To feel that we must cast about to vindicate what we 
do, is to confess to ourselves a doubt of the legality of 
it. Every elaborate argument made in defence of our 
present action in Asia is in the nature of an apology, 
and is suggestive of self-mistrust ; and self-mistrust 
may be followed by hesitation, and hesitation by re- 
morse and amendment. And the growth of such a 
state of the national mind is apparent in the manner 
in which our statesmen have, during the last few 
years, begun to talk and act with regard to India. 
It is with India alone that I have to deal in this 
essay; nor should I have travelled even thus far 
beyond our connection with that country, unless it 
had been my purpose to show at the outset that I 
considered our position there an incident only in our 
larsfer relations with Asia. 

What we have done in India has become far more 
palpable and glaring to the perceptions of the mass of 
us since its consummation. It is nearly always true 
of crimes and errors, that the obscuration under which 
they were committed dissolves suddenly after its uses 
are over. The crash of the great mutiny, by which 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 229 

the transfer of the possessions of the East India Com- 
pany to the Cro^\T[i was brought about, finally and 
somewhat abruptly effected our enlightenment. The 
English people felt its own usurpation thoroughly 
for the first time when it heard its Queen proclaimed 
Empress of India. The land was indeed won then, 
the throne mounted, and the title assumed. Since 
then it is pleasant to own that '^our duties to the 
Hindoos " are words that have been in the mouths of 
many of our statesmen, and reparation to the Hindoos 
an idea that has been secretly in the hearts of a few. 
Few, indeed, would agree probably upon a schedule 
of those duties, and fewer, it may be, upon a theory 
of that reparation. But attempts to define and to de- 
clare the one and the other seem to make the proper 
task of any one who thinks or writes upon "our 
Indian Empire." 

But before we can lay do^vn for ourselves a 
method for the performance of our duties, we must 
know how the task has arisen ; before we can plan 
reparation, we must know what we have to repair. 
Any efforts in either direction would be senseless 
without something like an honest review of the gra- 
dations by which the present situation has been 
reached. The historical sketch, therefore, which I 
proceed to make is not a purposeless and vexatious 
recapitulation of thrice-told stories ; still less is it in- 
tended to raise the ghost of the old question, What 
right had we in India at the first? Practical as such 
a discussion is when applied to China and Japan, it 
would be the pedantry of ethics to revive it for 
India. After all, morality is relative; and it would 
be an anachronism to judge Clive and his masters 
by principles of which the lapse of a century since 



230 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

Ms death has not achieved the full acknowledgment. 
But if a practical philosophy is disposed at this date 
to pardon the establishment of the East India Com- 
pany as a territorial power in India, the ground of 
this pardon must be carefully kept clear. It is not 
because the consolidation and security of their trade 
required it. That is the old apology, which we can- 
not admit ; if for none other reason, because to admit 
it would be to eternalise its application. We must 
never forget to combat the assumption of the two 
ancient alternatives — commerce or subjugation. We 
must make up our minds henceforth to expect re- 
cusance, energetic and prolonged, whenever we make 
overtures for intimacy to races utterly alien to our 
own. Of course this recusance is as unintelligible 
to us as to those who exhibit it is our recklessness 
of contact. The historical accidents of Western 
Europe have destroyed the reserve of its races. Just 
so the poHtical continuity of the great Asiatic systems 
has maintained the reserve, or, as we hostilely name 
it, the exclusiveness of the Asiatics. Besides, the 
blessings which arise to the Indian, Chinese, or Ja- 
panese from European intercourse are not quite so 
palpable to their recipients as the European imagines 
they ought to be. What have we given to Asia, 
after all? In giving us tea, coffee, rice, and spices, 
she has to a vast extent revolutionised the diet of 
Europe ; have we done any thing in the same direc- 
tion or to the same extent for her? We do not 
certainly owe the art of pottery to her ; but its 
development and application among us durmg the 
last two centuries have been hastened much by the 
exported specimens of her porcelain. She has be- 
stowed upon us the inestimable blessings of silk and 



EXGLAXD AXD I^'DIA. 1161 

cotton; and has suggested to us a dozen minor 
luxuries, which may be typified by the umbrella 
and the fan. All these commodities, except the two 
last, we now class among the necessaries of exist- 
ence ; at least, they are the luxuries of our masses 
doT\TL to their very poorest members. What have 
we foimd to bestow in return? It would perplex a 
London merchant to say. The fact is, that the com- 
munities of India, China, and Japan are constructed 
upon lines so vast, within geographical limits so ex- 
tended, and under chmatic conditions so varied and 
so happy, that they are each and all of them self- 
sufficient. Intercommunion to them is not the ne- 
cessity that it is to hungry and comparatively ill- 
provided Europe. Of course communion is good for 
all the members of the human family ; but its uses 
are not most palpable to the most comfortable, or 
rather its most palpable uses are for the benefit of 
the least comfortable. Moreover, its most universal 
advantages are also its most hidden, and underlie 
the comparison of religions, ethics, and social systems. 
But these are subsequent, and in their nature are 
of the very slowest growth, and receive tlie most 
tardy acknowledgment. We have no excuse, there- 
fore, for that irritated impatience which rushes to 
arms against the barriers of a fundamental and re- 
spectable reserve. 

The true excuse for the earlier conquests of the 
English in India is, that we were committed to them 
in days which, compared to our own, may be called 
days of political and moral ignorance. When they 
were undertaken, they were thought not only to be 
necessary, but honourable. Xow such thmgs are 
known to be neither. Unfortunately, too, they were 



232 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

continued in another and more objectionable form, in 
days when such things were known to be neither. 
Clive, and his more immediate followers in the train 
of empire, fought openly a war of aggrandisement on 
their own part, against one of extermination on that 
of their antag-onists. There was no mincins; of mat- 
ters, no hypocrisy, no cant, no casuistry. The Eng- 
lishman declared his motives, and the Hindoo under- 
stood them. The issue was fairly fought out, and 
from time to time more and more territory passed 
into the hands of the invading race, either after open 
battle or avowed diplomacy. Reading by the light 
of a later morality, no one will pretend to say that 
the wars or negotiations of a Clive or a Hastings 
were blameless ; but they were not blamable after 
the same fashion as the acts of a Dalhousie. In the 
early days the directors of the East India Company 
in London never deprecated an increase of territory, 
except on the score of its inconvenience. But there 
came a time when wars and negotiations for aggran- 
disement in India were denounced at home, not only 
as impolitic, but as unjust. They were absolutely 
forbidden, and the ambition of energetic and astute 
governors-general thereby brought to a standstill. 
From that time commences the epoch of conquest by 
chicanery. Thenceforth it was necessary to cheat the 
native prince out of his dominions on the one hand, 
and to cheat the Honourable Company into accepting 
them on the other. But the development of the eni- 
pire, from its inauguration by Clive to its consum- 
mation by the Marquis of Hastings (who proclaimed 
the English Lords Paramount of India), was carried 
on with a certain openness and honesty of aggression 
and progress which no one who compares that epoch 



ENGLAND AXD INDIA. 233 

generally with tlie times that have succeeded it can 
fail to recognise. 

It is, indeed, true that Lord Cornwallis, who went 
out as the first Governor- General under Mr. Pitt's 
India Act of 1786, by his system of mutually protec- 
tive alliances with native states, nnwittingh^ created 
the materials for a great deal of that injustice which 
was the method of too many of his later successors. 
To take one instance : there can be no doubt that that 
condition in the treaty of 1792 with the Xawaub of 
the Carnatic, by which the British were to take tem- 
porary possession of the territory of that monarch, in 
the event of a war affecting the two states, was the 
very archetjn^e of those "temporary arrangements" 
which have been employed so largely to filch away 
the possessions of na^tive sovereigns.* But Lord Corn- 
wallis only unmttingly contributed to the meaner 
change. And Lord Wellesley, whom (if we regard 
Sir J. Shore's exceptional administration as a break 
in the true chain of our policy ui India) we may 
call his successor, still fortmiately preserved, with 
one exception, the more frank and less reprehensible 
method. That one exception was the treaty by which 
the civil and mihtary government of the Carnatic be- 
came vested in the East India Company. But even 
.that result of the pohtical helplessness engendered by 
the treaty of 1792 must not entirely be laid to the 
account of Lord WeUesley. Lord CornwaUis, who 
provided for its inevitabihty, must share its odium. 
We have been asked by more than one writer 

* At this very moment we hold Mysore under a temporary arrange- 
ment, made by Lord WiUiam Bentinck in 1831. Lord Dalhousie an- 
nexed Oud© under cover of the treaty of 1801, which only stipulated 
for a power to enter and administer in case and during a crisis of 
anarchy aiid confusion. 



234 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

upon the affairs of India to consider that Lord Wel- 
lesley revolutionised our policy in the Peninsula. I 
confess that I cannot see how he did more than pur- 
sue, with the largeness of a great ambition, and with 
the fertility of great occasions, the course of his pre- 
decessors. No doubt the people of England were 
astonished and alarmed at the point of vastness to 
which the partition of the dominions of Tippoo, the 
commutation treaty of 1800 with the Nizam, and the 
submission of Scindia and the Eajah of Berar, had 
extended their territory in India. In their terror, 
they attributed the gigantic growth in its entirety 
to Lord Wellesley, and fancied that they detected a 
novel policy underlying all his acts, and tending to so 
monstrous an agglomeration. Under this impression 
it was that they recalled him, and sent out Lord Corn- 
wallis again, as a corrective to him. And so far there 
is no doubt that the last-named peer — an octogenarian 
with shattered health and broken nerves — did share 
and act in concert with the public timidity during his 
second administration. But the Cornwallis of 1805 
differed as widely from the Cornwallis of 1792 as he 
did from Lord Wellesley himself.* The reaction, 
however, did not last long. The attitude of absolute 
isolation, which he and his well-meaning successor 
endeavoured to assume in India, soon manifested it- 
self as impossible to the clear mind of Lord Minto, 
and, what was more, to that far less discerning aggre- 
gate, the Secret Committee in London. In a de- 
spatch dated September 10th, 1811, the latter body 

^' On the incapacity of Lord Cornwallis during his second adminis- 
tration, conf. Sir J. Malcolm's Pol. Hist, of India, vol. i. passim, and 
Correspondence of Lord Metcalfe, Letter to Mr. Sherer, August 31,, 
1805. 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 235 

observe, " the permanent security of the British re- 
sidents in India does not depend upon any supposed 
balance of power among the native states : it is like 
the naval supremacy of this country (England); our 
power ought never to be extended for the purpose of 
aggression and injustice; but it ought to be para- 
mount over all, if all should be combined against it, 
or it will probably soon cease to exist." But Lord 
Minto needed no sermonising from Leadenhall Street 
to teach him that the position of the English in India, 
acquired, as it had been, by high-handed might, stood 
on exactly the same basis as did the other mushroom 
states that were raised from time to time around it, 
by the ambition of one or other of those remarkable 
men whom the soil of India produced in such abund- 
ance, for her trouble, on the dissolution of the empire 
of Delhi. He considered the Company to be as fully 
committed to diplomacy or the sword as Scindia or 
any other of his or their military rivals. "It has not,, 
perhaps, been sufficiently considered," wrote Lord 
Minto in one of his minutes, " that every native 
state in India is a military despotism; that war and 
conquest are avowed as the first and legitimate pur- 
suits of every sovereign or chief, and the whole source 
of glory and renown : it is not, therefore, a mere con- 
jecture, deduced from the natural bias of the human 
mind and test of general experience, but a certain 
conviction, founded on avowed principles of action 
and systematic views, that among military states and. 
chiefs of India the pursuits of ambition can alone be 
bounded by the inability to prosecute them." We can 
understand, therefore, how it was that the Company at 
this time had not foresworn conquest. We can at this 
particular point of their career even find an additional 



236 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

excuse for wars of aggrandisement. For a Power 
lying among such neighbours, and formed exactly 
as they had been formed, could only exist, as they 
existed, by an unceasing struggle to be supreme. 

But there was an essential and very honourable 
difference between the administration of Lord Minto 
and those of his predecessors. He had, indeed, de- 
stroyed beyond reprieve the policy of absolute isola- 
tion ; but to his honour be it said, that the policy of 
interference which he revived, in his hands was never 
the instrument of mjurious aggression. He assumed 
the British empire in India as an accomplished fact, 
and regarded it as the common arbiter of the com- 
monwealth of Indian states. He was for ever talking 
and writing of " our political ascendency on the con- 
tinent of India." But his conception of the uses of 
that ascendency was undoubtedly that it should be 
exercised on the side of justice and the general peace. 
England was to keep the police of the Peninsula; and 
under him she did more or less keep it, and she did 
no more. I may be mistaken, but I cannot call to 
mind one single addition which he made to the Com- 
pany's territories. He conquered, indeed, the island 
of Java; but that was in reality in another capacity, 
and for the Crown. But he paved the way for Lord 
Hastings, whose career was an admixture of his own 
and Lord Wellesley's, or rather at once the develop- 
ment and consummation of both. The great office 
which Lord Minto had proclaimed and undertaken on 
behalf of his country became grander and more de- 
finable as Lord Hastings illustrated it and magnified 
it by conquest after conquest, in the manner of their 
great common predecessor, whom he loved to quote 
and imitate. Nepaul humbled, Scindia overthrown. 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 237 

the Pindarees extinguislied, and the Mahrattas van- 
quished and outmtted both, — all these worked fitly 
up to the grand climax and close of the reign of Lord 
Hastings, the proclamation of the British as the lords 
paramount of India. 

We may pass over the short administration of Mr. 
Adam, as we did that of Sir John Barlow. So far as 
the political history of India is concerned, it was short, 
eventless, and inoffensive. There was httle even in 
the career of Lord Amherst of which we need take 
notice. The Burmese war, for which he was not re- 
sponsible, and the heroic but gratuitous storming of 
Bhurtpore, the result of a ridiculous interference m a 
petty djTiastic revolution, occupied him until 1826. 
We may limit our notice of him to the fact that he 
made good a technical flaw in the assumption of 
British headship by Lord Hastings. The ancient 
vassalage of the Company to Delhi, acknowledged in 
its older and less audacious days, had never been 
formally abrogated. The king of Delhi still existed, 
and was still acknowledged in all his titular supre- 
macy throughout Hindoostan. The incongruousness 
of this duality was noticed by Lord Amherst ; and as 
the obstacle showed itself in his way, he finally deter- 
mined on and carried out its abolition. The kingdom 
of Delhi was extinguished in form, and, amid the pro- 
foundest sensation of the native princes, the independ- 
ence and sovereignty of the British were jointly pro- 
claimed. Lentil the day, therefore, of the return of 
Lord Amherst to England, the political conduct of 
the British in India formed but the fringe to Lord 
Hastino-s' gown. 

With Lord William Bentinck, however, commenced 
that new and lower system which, mth but few inter- 



238 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

ruptions, was to be continued to and consummated in 
the days of Lord Dalhousie. The people of England 
had now reached that particular point in temper and 
morality when they were resolved to reject conquest, 
l)ut were ready to accept casuistry as the means of 
aggrandisement. It must always be mentioned as the 
one blot upon the j^ersonal character of Lord William 
Bentinck, that his treatment of the Mysore Eajah in- 
augurated the vicious system which, in the many 
varieties of its exercise, has so discredited us among 
the princes and peoples of India. So long as we were 
avowed conquerors, they understood us ; perhaps they 
even sympathised with us. Accustomed to a quasi- 
feudalism, and looking upon the Mohammedan conquest 
as a comparatively modern event, they were probably 
not shocked beyond conciliation at the apparition of 
our supremacy. It matters little to a Rajah, inde- 
pendent in all save the name, m whose favour he 
acknowledges an unsubstantial vassalage. But Lord 
William Bentinck opened a novel and far more ter- 
rible vista of politics to the eyes of all those who, 
either in their own persons or by their ancestors, had 
subscribed written treaties with the British, or who 
had accepted conditional dominion at their hands. 

The careers of Lord Auckland and Lord Ellen- 
borough formed a brief recurrence to the older method 
of appropriation. But the former, superseded and 
appalled, left India only to hear that his scheme of 
the conquest of AiFghanistan was repudiated by al- 
most the first public proclamation of his successor. 
And the latter in his turn lived to be recalled simply 
because he was a conqueror. He was succeeded by 
Lord Hardinge, who conquered the Sikhs in a war 
Yfhich was simply one of defence on the part of the 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 239 

Britisli. Xot even in its termination, so glorious to 
the arms of the \dctors, did the Governor- General 
suffer it to degenerate into an excuse for territorial 
aggrandisement; as the following extract from his 
speech to the assembled chieftains at Lahore abund- 
antly shows : 

"For forty .years," he tells them, "it was the policy of Rnn- 
geet Singh's time to culfciyate friendly relations between the two 
Goyemments ; and during the whole of that period the Sikh 
nation was independent and happy. Let the policy of that able 
man be the model for your future imitation. The British Govern- 
ment in no respect provoked the late war. It had no objects of 
aggrandisement to obtain by hostilities. The proof of sincerity 
is to be found in its moderation in the hour of victory. A just 
quarrel followed by a successful war has not changed the policy 
of the British Government. The British Government does not 
desire to interfere in your affairs. I am ready and anxious to 
withdraw every British soldier from Lahore. ****** 
I state this openly, that all the world may know the truth, and 
the motives by which I am actuated in this matter." 

These three last-named noblemen exhaust the 
line of Governors- General down to Lord Dalhousie, 
who was succeeded by Lord Canning and the mutiny. 
It was Lord Dalhousie who most thoroughly recog- 
nised and submitted to what had been the temper of 
the ComjDany and the people of England since 1833, 
the date of the new charter. He is the typical hero 
of the later regime : and what was that regime^ and 
what was the method of its exponents? It was 
spoliation under the garb of legality ; war behind the 
shirts of treaties; cruelty in name of philanthropy. 
It was a diplomacy that deliberately watched and 
fostered the advent of the foreknown conditions under 
which it could speciously claim to step in and anni- 
hilate, affectiag, when the time came, to run the 



240 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

risk of a legal opinion upon its rights. Just so, the 
devil, having debased his victim beyond redemption, 
has been known to submit to play a game at chess for 
his soul. 

I shall now cull two or three instances to illus- 
trate what, as he was its great exhibitor, I shall call 
the Dalhousian method. It is true that Lord William 
Bentinck on account of the Mysore appropriation, 
and Lord Canning for his treatment of Dhar, have a 
reputation deeply tinged with this stain. Nor must 
we forget that every Governor- General since Lord 
William Bentinck has had a share in perpetuating 
the one great injustice of his administration. But no 
one has approached Lord Dalhousie in his own speci- 
ality; in all the subtilties and audacities of "annexa- 
tion" he was supreme. I will begin my list of illus- 
trations with the case of the Eajah of Mysore. 

In 1831 Lord William Bentinck intimated to the 
Rajah of Mysore that the British Government had 
determined to take into its own hands the manage- 
ment of his kingdom. The cause of this determina- 
tion was stated to be the misrule of the Rajah; the 
sanction of it, a clause in the treaty of 1799 between 
him and the East India Company. This treaty of 
1799 was that otherwise well known as the subsi- 
diary treaty with Mysore, and was a part of the 
general arrangement by which the partition of the 
dominions of Hyder All was carried out after the death 
of Tippoo Sahib. After the overthrow of Tippoo, his 
possessions fell by the right of conquest to the victors, 
the Nizam of the Deccan and the English. As every 
one who knows any thing of the history of India 
remembers, a portion of the spoils was handed over 
to the Nizam, and the residue was retained by the 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 241 

English. The latter, after having set apart certain 
districts of their own share for themselves, restored 
the remainder to the heir of the old Ime of Hindoo 
princes, which Hyder Ali had dispossessed. This heir 
was then a child of four. I mention his age because 
it is an important element of consideration when we 
come to estimate the treatment which he subse- 
quently received at the hands of the English. He 
was not, however, raised unconditionally to the mus- 
nud. His signature to the subsidiary treaty was 
made — and, considering all things, not unnaturally 
made — the price of his elevation. This instrument 
may broadly be said to have been an agreement for 
an offensive and defensive alliance between the Rajah 
and the Company, with certain guarantees, moral as 
well as material, for the performance by the weaker 
and less responsible party of his part of the engage- 
ment. The moral guarantees were what the British 
pledged themselves somewhat indirectly to do; the 
material were what the Rajah consented that they 
should take. The main engagement into which the 
Rajah entered was to proidde an annual sum of 
money in times of peace, in consideration of the 
maintenance by the Company of a military force for 
the protection of his dominions ; and in times of war 
to furnish an additional sum to meet the extraordi- 
nary military expenses which that protection would 
then entail upon the Company. The due perform- 
ance of this engagement was secured by Article 4 of 
the treaty, which was as follows : 

" And wliereas it is indispensably necessary that effectual and 
lasting security should be provided against any failui-e in the 
funds destined to defray either the expenses of the permanent 
military force in time of peace or the extraordinary expenses 

R 



242 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

described in the third article of the present treaty, it is hereby 
stipulated and agreed between the contracting parties, that when- 
ever the Goyernor-General in Conncil of Bengal shall have reason 
to apprehend snch failure in the funds so destined, the said Gover- 
nor-General in Council sTiall le at lilerty, and sliall have full power 
and right, either to introduce such regulatio7is and ordinances as he 
shall deem expedient for the internal management and collection of 
the revenues, or for the letter ordering of any other Iranch and de- 
;partment of the government of Mysore, or to assume and bring 
under the direct management of the servants of the said Company, 
Behauder, such part or parts of the territorial possessions of his 
Highness Maha Eajah Mysore Kistna Oodiaver Behauder, as 
shall appear to him, the said Governor-General in Council, neces- 
sary to render the said funds efficient and available either in time 
of peace or war." 

Article 5 explains tlie method that shall always be 
adhered to in carrying out the provisions of Article 4 ; 
and these two Articles, along with Article 14, which I 
shall quote a little further on, are the only portions 
of the treaty with which I shall have to deal. 

The child thus suddenly taken from exile and 
obscurity was placed at once upon his throne, with 
Purnia, the able but unscrupulous financier of Tippoo, 
for his principal adviser. It does not apj)ear that 
the minister had any very exalted vievfs of the re- 
lation in which he was placed to his young master, 
or that those who sanctioned his elevation ever 
thought that he had. He contented himself with 
filling the treasury, after the old fashion, with money 
wrung out of an exhausted and patient j)eople. On 
the other hand, the East India Company conceived, 
as we are forced to presume, that, ha^dng magnani- 
mously created the boy king, they were entitled to 
wash their hands of him and his people, owning no 
responsibility whatever for the career or fortunes of 
either. The young Eajah was therefore left altoge- 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 243 

ther to his palace and his pleasures, and, as nineteen 
out of every twenty of young princes in Europe or 
Asia either have done, or would have done under 
similar circumstances, he abandoned himself to the 
seductions of his position. There is no reason to 
doubt that, from the time of his accession initil that 
of his virtual deposition by Lord William Bentinck, 
he led a career of debauchery continuous and ex- 
ceeding. He was very likely just as good a mon- 
arch — no better, no worse — as Sardanapalus is com- 
monly said to have been on the eve of the ChaldaBan 
insurrection. Neither is there any reason to doubt 
that at the time we did interfere to remove him, some 
interference on our part had become a matter as 
much to be desired in favour of his people, as an 
intervention in favour of the Neapolitans might have 
been against their king, Francis the Second. Tech- 
nically the English had no right to interfere in either 
case : and in the latter we abstained because the scene 
of action was in Europe, where we are cautious and 
law- fearing ; in the former we did not abstain because 
the scene of action was in Asia, and in Asia we are 
bold and high-handed. Not, however, that any one 
would have been disposed to blame Lord William 
Bentinck and his advisers for acting somewhat as they 
did in the contingency then presented to them in 
Mysore, if only they had had no hand in contriving 
it. I believe also that it is a moot question whether 
or not it is public law, that if the internal aifairs of 
a state are in such a condition as to make it a source 
of peril, or even of grave amioyance, to its neigh- 
bours, they may intervene to bring about a better 
state of things ; but for that end only ; and this 
gained, their right ceases. 



244 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

Had Lord William Bentinck, therefore, seeing a 
state of things in Mysore for which the British 
Government were in no sense or degree responsible, 
and which was perilous or seriously annoying to 
British India, interfered, urging the public law of 
nations and the general good, even to the extent of 
assuming temporarily the government of the country, 
History would have apologised for his action, and 
have passed on at once from his method to its results. 
But these conditions were unfortunately wanting. 
The internal evils of Mysore were undoubtedly and 
lamentably patent : but, in the first place, the British 
Government was, as I shall show, more or less re- 
sponsible for their existence; in the second place, 
Lord W. Bentinck never urged that they were either 
perilous or annoying beyond the frontiers of the 
Rajah's dominions; and, in the third place, he did not 
base his interference on public law, but on the provi- 
sions of the fourth article of the subsidiary treaty, 
which I have quoted at length above. 

Now, to take these points one by one. First, I 
say that the British Government were responsible for 
the accumulated misrule of the Rajah. The mon- 
archy was of their own creation. After much discus- 
sion at Calcutta and Madras, they carved the king- 
dom out of their share of the spoils of Tippoo, they 
selected the monarch, and placed him on the throne. 
They knew he was not five years of age when they 
did so. They knew what the dangers are that have 
beset young men so placed in the possession of bound- 
less wealth and supreme position, from the accession 
of Rehoboam to the regency of George the Fourth. 
Did they imagine that these dangers were modified 
by the climate, or by the manners and customs of 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 245 

Asia? Was there any thing in the domestic history 
of the princes of India that led them to think that 
Hindoo lads upon the musnud gave less cause for 
watchfulness and anxiety, or wanted counsel and 
education less, than young Europeans on or hard by 
a throne? That could hardly be, because Article 14 
of the subsidiary treaty is in these terms : 

" His Highness Maha Eajah. Mysore Kistna Eajah Oodiayer 
Behauder hereby promises to pay, at all times, the utmost atten- 
tion to such advice as the Compamfs government shall occasionally 
judge it necessaj-y to offer to him, ivith a view to the economy of his 
finances, the letter collection of his revenues, the administration of 
justice, the extension of commerce, the encouragement of trade, agri- 
culture^ and industry, or any other objects connected loifh the advance- 
ment of His Highness' s interests, the happiness of his peop)le, and the 
mutual welfare of loth states'' 

Now if these words are not expressive, not so 
much of an acceptance as of a claim of tutorship and 
constant and kindly supervision, it would be as well 
to ask what others could have been. It is as though 
the framers of the treaty had said to the Eajah, ''You 
will not probably see the necessity, for your own sake, 
for your people's sake, for your neighbours' sake, of 
being looked after. We do : we foresee your neces- 
sities; we acknowledge our duties and responsibili- 
ties; and we pledge you therefore beforehand." But 
was this article — so wise, so just, so broad in its scope, 
teeming mth so much sense of sponsorship, so fa- 
therly and beneficent in its intentions towards the 
child whom its framers had called from his obscure 
nursery to a throne — ever acted upon? So far from 
the Company's government "occasionally judging it 
necessary to offer advice" to the young Kajah, did it 
ever offer him any real advice at all? I know that he 
was threatened once or twice towards the close of his 



246 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

rule; but even remembering this, I should like to 
know how many precursors there were to the severe 
letter in which Lord William Bentinck announced to 
him that the cup of his misdomgs was full, and that 
his kingdom was forthwith to be taken from him? 

From the very first the Company neglected their 
young 'protege. Sir John Malcolm was, indeed, ap- 
pointed Resident at Mysore at the outset; but he 
resigned the post within five years after the crea- 
tion of the kingdom. And as a late advocate of the 
Eajah, one who is too excited and hasty to be gene- 
rally trusted, but who tells the truth in this instance, 
lias written: 

" After the departure of Sir John Malcolm, the first Eesident 
at Mysore, in 1804, Purnia was left to pursue his own plans, 
in possession of undivided authority, undisturbed and unin- 
structed by the government of Madras or its representative the 
Eesident. The young Eajah was left to the enlightened tuition 
of his mother, his grandmother, and the other ladies of the 
harem." 

They forgot that generally by raising him to power 
of their own accord, and specially by the fourteenth 
article of a treaty framed by themselves, they had 
made him at once their creature, their pupil, and 
their ward. It is the most flagrant of cruelties to 
place a helpless being in a position which without 
your aid you knov>^ he cannot fill ; to tell him so, as 
they did indirectly by the fourteenth clause; and 
then to leave him unaided and unwarned till the day 
when, after a lifetime of neglect, you come back to 
upbraid him with a degradation which you foresaw, 
but would not avert. 

Nor does this unwillingness to avert seem to have 
been entirely the denegation of duty. There is a 



ENGLAND AKD INDIA. 247 

smack ot something more positive than neglect. It 
is at least as well ascertained as the Report of the 
Special Committee appointed in 1830 to inquire into 
the state of Mysore may warrant us in considering it, 
that a belief was every where prevalent through the 
Eajah's dominions that a certain revolt among the 
Eyots (which was one pretext for our intervention) 
was looked upon as a good chance by the English 
Government, and had their goodwill and countenance. 
Moreover, the prescience of a keener mind than that 
of any of the Madras officials who made up this com- 
mittee leads us to something like the same conclusion. 
The Duke of Wellington, then General Wellesley, had 
occasion to write a letter upon the affairs of Mysore 
in 1804. In this letter are the following words : 

" In respect of Mysore, I recommend that a gentleman from 
the Bengal Civil Service shall be Malcolm's successor there. The 
government of that country should be placed under the imme- 
diate ;protecUon and superintendence of the Governor-G-eneral in 
Council. The G-overnor of Fort St. George ought to have no 
more to do with the Eajah than they have with the Soubar of the 
Deccan or the Peishwa. The consequence of the present system" 
[Mysore was then in connection with Madras] "will be that the 
Eajah's government will be destroyed by corruption, or, if it be 
not corrupt, by calumny. I know of no person, either civil or 
military, at Fort St. George, who would set his face against the 
first evil, or who has strength of character or talents to defend 
the Government against the second. In my opinion, the only 
remedy is to take the Eajah under the wing of the Governor- 
General." 

This advice was acted upon for a very brief period; 
but the attention of the Calcutta Government was 
soon relaxed, and the reio^n of Madras recommenced. 
Under it an epoch of what certainly looks like inten- 
tional and watchful neglect supervened. The self- 



248 ENGLAKD AND INDIA. 

ruin of the Eajah was regarded step by step with a 
complacency that grew as his downward pace was 
accelerated; because it was known that the day 
which saw his actual deposition would dawn upon a 
golden era of patronage and emolument for the Go- 
vernor and civil servants of Madras. 

This artistic abstinence was not even interrupted 
for one moment, when Purnia, the minister of the 
Company's own original selection, succumbed to the 
intrigues of the wretched minions who had been per- 
mitted to surround and debase the childhood of the 
young Eajah; nor when the latter himself, in the 
year 1811 — having then attained the mature age of 
sixteen years — dismissed his minister, proclaimed him- 
self out of leading-strings, and assumed, or aiFected 
to assume, absolute power. Scarcely one word of 
remonstrance or advice was tendered him from that 
day; certainly none on that occasion. Little more 
than a chuckle came from Madras ; and that no doubt 
was smothered, lest it should check the course of 
events. At least, from first to last, no practical inter- 
ference, such as Article 14 of the subsidiary treaty 
expressly pointed to, was ever attempted. In 1827 
things had gone so far as to satisfy the Government 
of Madras that the end it coveted was at hand. It 
was not, however, considered desirable, perhaps (for 
to such diplomatists there is a residuum of conscience, 
after all), it was not considered reputable that the 
last step should be taken too abruptly. Also it was 
plain that the Eajah was now beyond repentance and 
self-reclamation, and that a solemn warning would do 
no harm, that is, would cause no risk of checking him. 
So Sir Thomas Munro visited Mysore, had an inter- 
view with His Highness, and fulminated the hrutum 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 249 

fulmen so long withheld, and then so artistically and 
safely administered. 

" I concluded," he writes of the interview in question, in a 
minute composed at the time, " by saying that the disorder of the 
Eajah's affairs had reached such a height as would justify the 
Government in acting on the fourth article of the treaty; but that, 
as a direct interference in the administration or assumption for 
a time of a part of the Mysore territory, could not be undertaken 
without lessening the dignity of His Highness, and shaking his 
authority in such a manner that it would be impracticable ever 
to reestablish it, I was unwilling to adopt such a course until the 
last extremity, and wished to give him an opportunity of restoring 
order himself. But if reform were not immediately begun, direct 
interference would be unavoidable." 

Any thing more unstatesmanlike or more uncan- 
did than these words are cannot well be. In the first 
place, it might have occurred to a man in Sir Thomas 
Munro's position — and the fact that it probably did 
occur to him is the worst as well as the most natural 
presumption — that "direct interference" and "as- 
sumption of territory" were not the only alternatives 
open to the tutelary friends of the Mysore Kajah. 
The treaty quoted above might have supplied — it 
probably did — to Sir Thomas Munro the idea that a 
third method of intervention was " indirect interfer- 
ence." If not only in 1827, but in 1799 — though 
better in 1827 than never — this last expedient had 
been tried, Mysore might have been now the model 
native state in India; a precedent to the British on 
the one hand, and an example to the Indian princes 
on the other. It would have taught the latter how 
kingdoms might be ruled, and how the monarchies of 
the Peninsula might be improved by the exhibition 
of remedies a little less active than extirpation. 

Why, instead of administering half-a-dozen vague 



250 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

and inactive rebukes in the course of tliirty-one years, 
and then proceeding, with a complacency only too 
patent, to rake in the proceeds of vagueness and in- 
action, did we not, as was contemplated and sug- 
gested by the 14th Article of the treaty, give the 
Rajah substantial, formal, tangible, specific ad^dce? 
Why not have recommended this measure and that 
measure, we who knew as well what ought as what 
ought not to be done, "Avith a view to the economy 
of his finances, the better collection of his revenues, 
the administration of justice, the extension of com- 
merce, the encouragement of trade, agriculture, and 
industry, and any other objects connected with the ad- 
vancement of His Highness's interests, the hajDpiness 
of his people, and the mutual welfare of both states"? 
Was all this, so elaborately stated and provided, im- 
possible ? Did the framers of the clause think it so ? 
or were they so dishonest as to have framed it with 
the fixed intention of making it a dead letter ? Could 
they not, and would they not, have carried it out? 
And were not their successors less honest or less able 
— probably both, certainly the former — than they? 
From time to time it would have been perfectly easy, 
especially if the custom had been made coeval with 
the Rajah's institution, to have ofiered such advice in 
a form that could have been reduced at once to ordi- 
nances issued and changes effected in the Rajah's own 
name, and ostensibly on his own responsibility. And 
if at first there had been anything like a troublesome 
recusance, there was the 4th Article to fall back upon, 
which, in case of necessity, authorised the Governor- 
General in Council to "introduce such regulations 
and ordinances as he shall deem expedient for the 
internal management and collection of the revenues, 



ENGLAND AND INDIA, 251 

or for the better ordering of any other branch and 
department of Mysore." It is true that the powers 
of this 4th article are given only in case of any dan- 
•ger of nonfulfilment by the Rajah of his engagement 
to provide the military and pecuniary contingents 
mentioned in Articles 2 and 3. But inasmuch as, 
mthout the presence of any such danger, the vir- 
tual appropriation of the kingdom was carried out 
under the same Article 4, it might well have been 
considered sufficiently elastic to bear the lighter 
straiQ. 

And this leads me to insist more clearly than 
hitherto upon the technical illegality of the seizure of 
Mysore. All our powers under the treaty spring, 
and spring only, from danger to the subsidy. It was 
confessed on all hands at the time of the appropriation 
that the subsidy was in no danger whatever. Lord 
William Bentinck saw the false position as soon as 
ever it had been assumed; and in 1834 he expressed 
himself very plainly and strongly on the subject in a 
secret despatch to the Court of Directors at London. 
His perceptions were no doubt very much quickened 
by the report of the Select Committee alluded to 
above, which had been appointed to inquire into the 
state of Mysore. This report seems to have been put 
forth a day or two too late for its only obvious prac- 
tical value ; but from it Lord William Bentinck found 
that he had been deceived and misled by the patron- 
age-lovers and office-hunters of Madras. The pam- 
phleteer whom I have already cited says that it is 
well known (and if it be not true, some one had 
better deny it) that Lord William Bentinck, after 
his return to England, repeatedly declared that the 
-supercession of the Bajah of Mysore was the only 



252 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

incident of his Indian administration that he looked 
back upon mth sorrow. 

I might discuss here at length the question how 
far the denunciations of the Kajah by the Madras' 
officials were exaggerated or false ; how far the 
revolt of the north-western provinces of his kingdom 
was caused, not by the personal misgovernment of 
the Rajah, but by the antecedent exactions of Purnia, 
whose regency we had ourselves created when we 
established the monarchy : but such a discussion 
would by no means promote my object. I accept 
the hypothesis that the conduct of the Rajah had 
become grievously bad; and I use it to show how 
ill the East India Company and its chief servants at 
Calcutta and Madras, who should have considered 
themselves the tutors of the child, interpreted the 
responsibility which his elevation by themselves had 
cast on them ; to show how little they valued the 
honour of the British name in India in comparison 
with the vista of patronage which his debasement 
and extinction opened out to them; and how dis- 
astrous was the choice they made between a policy 
of neglect, chicanery, and confiscation, and one of 
duty, generosity, and good faith. 

I have no need to follow the fortunes of the 
prince of Mysore from the day of his supercession 
until now : suffice it to say that he is yet alive ; and 
that even in his old age he has not ceased to protest 
against his virtual dethronement. For a long time 
he was deluded by fair words into a belief that his 
punishment was but temporary, and that, in the 
words of Lord Auckland,'^ " the administration of his 
territories should remain on its present footing until 
* Letter of the 28tli of March 1836. 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 253 

the arrangements for their good government should 
have been so firmly established as to be secure from 
future disturbance." But as time wore on, fair words 
began to lose their varnish; and the suppliant — for 
such he had now grown to be — was told more and 
more plainly that the hour of his restoration would 
never sound. The fact w^as, that day by day it 
became more difficult, as also it became more un- 
pleasant, to restore him. The agency, which Lord 
William Bentinck had promised in 1830 should be 
"exclusively native," had long become exclusively 
European, and the Mysore commission was now a 
fruitful field of patronage and emolument. There 
is no doubt that the pacification of the country and 
its prosperity has been brought about by the new 
regime; but not in a manner to render the restora- 
tion of the old government possible. On the con- 
trary, the substitution of English for native officers 
all through the kingdom for so many years had 
extinguished for a time the materials for a native 
organisation. This was not the intention of the 
treaty, but it was the intention of those who exe- 
cuted it; and they have carried it out successfully. 
Eor what statesman could come to Parliament and 
ask for the restoration of the Rajah, when he would 
be met by the assertion, indisputably true, that if he 
were restored to-morrow, and the European admi- 
nistrative staff withdrawn, there would not be to be 
found a single native of any thing approaching to the 
education and capacity requisite to fill a single post 
of eminence? The difficulty is patent, and for the 
present fatal; but who and what have produced it? 

It was reserved for Lord Dalhousie to be the 
first who should speak out plainly on behalf of the 



254 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

absolute " annexation" of Mysore ; for be it remem- 
bered that it is not yet "annexed." The Rajah is 
only virtually dethroned ; he is still titular sovereign, 
though the civil and military administration of his 
dominions has been taken away. The minute in 
which he spoke so plainly is eminently characteristic 
of Lord Dalhousie. 

" The treaty," says lie, " under wMcli Lord Wellesley raised 
the Eajah, while yet a child, to the mnsnud, and the treaty which 
was subsequently concluded with himself, were both silent as to 
heirs and successors. No mention is made of them ; the treaty 
is exclusively a personal one. 

" The inexpediency of continuing this territory by an act of 
gratuitous liberality to any other native prince, when the present 
Eajah shall have died, has been already conclusively shown by 
the conduct of His Highness himself, tvJiose rule, though he com- 
menced it under every advcmtage, ivas so scandalously and hope- 
lessly Md, that power has long since been taken from him by the 
Eritish Government. 

" I trust, therefore, that when the decease of the present 
Eajah shall come to pass, without son or grandson, or legitimate 
male heir of any description, the territory of Mysore, which will 
then have lapsed to the British Government, will be resumed, 
and that the good work which has been so well begun will be 
completed." 

The plea of a " personal" treaty was a favourite 
one with that Governor- General. He used it against 
the Nawaub of the Carnatic as well as against the 
Eajah of Mysore. It is rather more ludicrous, how- 
ever, in this case than in that ; for what on earth, it 
m.ay be asked, to go no further, would have been 
the use of creating a kingdom with all the elaborate 
machinery of a monarchy, and of inaugurating it 
with all the pomp and circumstance of a great inter- 
national arrangement, at the close of an important 
war, if it were intended to lapse at the end of one 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 255 

life? What object could there have been in inter- 
polating the single reign of the Kajah between the 
destruction of Tippoo and the assumption of his terri- 
tory by the Company, when that territory was already 
its own by the right of conquest, and had been for- 
mally allotted to it under the Partition treaty ? And 
again, to refer to the sentence which I have italicised, 
I wonder what were some of the advantages in Lord 
Dalhousie's mind when he penned those words? Un- 
happy boy ! With only a greater degree of cynicism 
might Louis XYIL, if he had ever come to the 
throne of France, have been said to commence his 
reign under every advantage, after going through 
what is asserted by some historians to have been his^ 
training by Simon in the Temple. 

It is needless to go further; the Rajah's suit is 
still before the English people. Some little strength 
it gained in the eyes of Lord Canning by the loyal 
conduct of the suppliant in the great mutiny. But 
though touched in the first instance to the point of 
dictating a very friendly and sympathetic despatch, 
he soon fell back into the normal official hardness; 
either because the callousness of security had super- 
vened upon the sensibility caused by a crisis of excite- 
ment and danger, or else because he had a hint from 
home. It is said that the present Secretary of State 
for India, Sir C. Wood, has resolved in council on the 
absolute annexation of Mysore ; and that the measure 
only w;aits the sanction of the Cabinet. This would 
be manifestly illegal, whatever the assumption of 
the administration may have been. The subsidiary 
treaty contains no clause whatever providing, under 
any circumstances, for the extinction of the monarchy 
which it created. If nothing better be done, the 



256 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

Eajah's heir, if he adopt one, ought to be allowed to 
succeed peacefully to the titular sovereignty. No 
one can wish otherwise who has the slightest care 
for his country's honour, or who, feeling that a great 
injustice and dereliction of duty has been perpetrated, 
would be unwilling to see to the door finally closed 
against the chance of its reparation. There is also 
another, and it may be a lower, because a more 
political, reason for keeping the Mysore case open; 
but that I will speak of further on. 

Having thus dwelt so long on the Mysore case, 
because it is the one instance which contrasts more 
clearly than any other what has and what ought to 
have been our method of dealing with the semi- 
dependent princes of India, and also because it is 
a case unconcluded, and therefore eminently sug- 
gestive and susceptible of experiment, with a view 
to a newer and better policy, — let me pass on to say 
a word or two upon the celebrated annexation of 
Oude. Here I am not obliged even to trace the 
outlines of the narrative. Most people to whom it 
is worth while to appeal know enough of the annex- 
ation of Oude to discuss it ; and even those who do 
not know more, know this, that, unlike most other 
pieces of profitable political profligacy, it has met 
with an almost universal reprobation at home. The 
chief pointy which the later revelations have enhanced, 
is the perversity and persistence of Lord Dalhousie 
on the subject. It used to be thought that he was 
merely the arch- offender, because he was in a position 
to give or to withhold the word of command. It 
used to be thought that the annexation was the evil 
mark which the greed of the Bengal Civil Service 
had long proposed to itself, and that Lord Dalhousie 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 257 

rather succumbed to solicitation than originated tlie 
seizure. It used to be thought that Lord Dalhousie 
only found too willing instruments of rapacity among 
Anglo-Indians of mark ; consequently they, and espe- 
cially Colonel Sleeman, on whose report of the state 
of Oude the annexation was supposed to have pro- 
ceeded, were subjected to far more opprobrium than 
their employer. But the disclosures which Colonel 
Sleeman or his personal friends, goaded by indig- 
nation and a sense of wrong, have made have quite 
reversed the relative positions of him and his master. 
So far from having recommended the course which 
Lord Dalhousie subsequently j)ursued, or from being 
the ready fabricator of its quasi-justification. Colonel 
Sleeman foresaw it and reprobated it in advance. 
In 1848 Lord Dalhousie had formally declared the 
principle that was to actuate him during his tenure 
of office. 

" I cannot conceive it possible," he wrote, " for any one to 
dispute the policy of taking adyantage of any just opportunity 
for consolidating the territories that already belong to us, by 
taking possession of states which may lapse in the midst of them; 
for thus getting rid of those petty intervening principalities 
which may be made a means of annoyance, but which can never, 
I venture to think, be a source of str-ength, for adding to the 
resources of the public treasury, and for extending the uniform 
application of our government to those whose best interests we 
sincerely believe will be promoted thereby." 

It is possible, and even probr.ble, that Lieutenant- 
Colonel Sleeman knew of this declaration, or at least 
that he was conscious of some very good reason to 
fear that Lord Dalhousie intended not merely the 
regeneration of Oude, but its appropriation. At all 
events, to the letter in which the Governor- General 
offered him the post of Resident at Lucknow, and 



258 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

which was most cautiously worded, so as to conceal 
any object beyond that of " the reconstruction of the 
internal administration of a great, rich, and oppressed 
country," Colonel Sleeman returned an answer as 
cautious, but which, indirectly and by reference to 
the bad faith which had been kept with the Punjaub, 
was a strong intimation that he would be no party to 
any false treatment of Oude. And in a letter written 
on the close of his tour of inspection through the 
country, after detailing all that might be done for it 
under a British administration, and after speaking 
too of the reciprocal advantages which his own go- 
vernment itself would derive from the restoration of 
Oude, he says, "But were we to take advantage of 
the occasion to annex Oude or any part of it, our 
good name in India would inevitably suffer, and that 
good name is more valuable to us than a dozen of 
Oudes." And what can be stronger than the follow- 
ing extract from a yet later letter, but one written 
while he was still resident at Lucknow? 

" The system of annexation, pursued by a party in this coun- 
try and favoured by Lord Dalhousie and his Council, has, in my 
opinion and in that of a large number of the ablest men in India, 
a downward tendency — a tendency to crush all the higher and 
middle classes connected with the land. These classes it should 
be our object to create and foster, that we might in the end in- 
spire them with a feeling of interest in the stability of our rule. 
We shall find, a few years hence, the tables turned against us. 
In fact, the aggressiye and absorbing policy which has done so 
much mischief of late in India, is beginning to create feel- 
ings of alarm in the native mind ; and it is when the popular 
mind becomes agitated by such alarms, that fanatics will always 
be found ready to step into Paradise over the bodies of the most 
prominent of those from whom injury is apprehended. I shall 
have nothing new to do at Lucknow. Lord Dalhousie and I have 
different views, I fear. If he wishes any thing done which I do 



ENGLAM) AND INDIA. 259 

not think right and honest, I resign, and leave it to be done by 
others. I desire a strict adherence to solemn engagements, whe- 
ther made with white faces or black. We have no right to annex 
or confiscate Oude ; bnt we haye a right, under the treaty of 1^537, 
to take the management of it, but not to appropriate the revenue 
to ourselves. We can do this with honour to our government and 
benefit to the people. To confiscate would be dishonest and dis- 
honourable. To annex would be to give the people a government 
almost as bad as their own, if we put our screw upon them. My 
position here has been and is disagreeable and unsatisfactory : we 
have a fool of a king, a knave of a minister, and both are under 
the influence of the cleverest, most intriguing, and most unscru- 
pulous villains in India." 

There was no doubt whatever of our right to 
interfere, and assume the administration of the king- 
dom of Oude. This the treaty of 1837 gave to us in 
terms full and precise : 

"If gross and systematic oppression, anarchy, and misrule, 
shall hereafter at any time prevail within the Oude dominions, 
such as seriously to endanger the public tranquillity, the British 
Government reserves to itself the right of appointing its own 
ofScers to the management of whatsoever portions of the Oude 
territory — either to a small or a great extent — in which such mis- 
rule as that above alluded to may have occurred, for so long a 
period as it may deem necessary ; the sm-plus receipts in such 
case, after defraying all charges, to be paid into the king's trea- 
sury, and a true and faithful account rendered to his majesty of 
the receipts and expenditure of the territory so assumed." 

Colonel Sleeman's report was conclusive beyond 
csLYil. If ever the terms, " gross and systematic op- 
pression, anarchy, and misrule," were applicable to 
the state of an earthly kingdom, they were applicable 
to Oude. But Lord Dalhousie was not contented 
with the provision which the treaty of 1837 had 
made for the contingency which had thus been sub- 
stantiated. In vain did every respectable ad\T[ser 



260 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

whom he had about him in the province of Bengal 
argue with him from the side of policy, and entreat 
him on the side of justice, to do no more than the 
treaty warranted. He was not the man to be stayed 
when hunting in view of his quarry. And it hap- 
pened to be a fact that the Court of Directors in 
London had written a certain despatch to Lord 
Auckland, after his ratification of this treaty of 1837, 
disapproving of its provisions, and ordering him to 
cancel it. This despatch Lord Auckland, knowing well 
his constitutional right to make treaties, had refused 
to notice, and the treaty of 1837 therefore remained 
until Lord Dalhousie's day the text of international 
relations between Oude and the East Lidia Company. 
Lord Hardinge had expressly threatened the Court 
of Oude that he would act on it if reforms were not 
executed, and in fact it had been argued from and 
acted upon from the day of its ratification until that 
of its only abrogation by Lord Dalhousie. All this 
his lordship discovered; but seizing with the concen- 
tration of rapacity upon the one point, that the Court 
of Directors had disapproved of it, he threw aside the 
facts that their disapproval was of no legal value, that 
Lord Auckland had never withdrawn his ratification, 
and that the treaty had always been acted upon, and 
coolly sent a message to the King of Oude, express- 
ing his regret that the abrogation of the treaty of 
1837 had never been communicated either to his 
predecessors or to himself! Nor was this all. He 
announced his intention of falling back on a certain 
treaty of 1801, and making that the sanction and 
groundwork of what he was about to do. Unfortu- 
nately the treaty of 1801 gave even less excuse than 
that of 1837 for the annexation of the country. By 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 261 

that instrument Saadut Ali, the reigning sovereign, 
ceded a considerable portion, in fact about one-half, 
of his dominions to the East India Company; and the 
East India Company, in return, guaranteed him and 
his successors in possession of the remainder. There 
was, indeed, a clause by which he was bound to 
govern in conformity with the counsels of his allies ; 
but to the rupture of this engagement no penalty 
whatever was attached.* The want of this was an 
oversight, no doubt, at the time, which probably the 
penal stipulation in the treaty of 1837 was intended 
to make good. But Lord Dalhousie felt that if he 
abandoned, or rather ignored, the limitations of 1837,- 
an illimitable area was opened to him by the silence 
of 1801. "All that the old treaty did not authorise, 
but did not forbid, I may do," he seems to have 
argued. " The old treaty having provided no pen- 
alty, it is for me to fill up the void." It was a 
magnificent extemporisation to imagine at the fag- 
end of a loosely worded agreement, the forfeiture of 
a kingdom! It reminds one of the late Mr. Mont- 

* The following is the text of Article 6 of the treaty of 1801 : 
" The territories ceded to the Honourable Company by the first 
article of this treaty shall be subject to the exclusive management 
and control of the said Company and their officers ; and the Hon- 
ourable East India Company hereby guarantee to his Excellency the 
Vizier, and to his heirs and successors, the possession of the terri- 
tories which will remain to his excellency after the territorial cession, 
together with the exercise of his and their authority within the said 
dominions. His excellency engages that he will establish in his re- 
served dominions such a system of administration (to be carried into 
effect by his own officers) as shall be conducive to the prosperity of his 
subjects, and be calculated to secure the lives and property of the 
inhabitants ; and his excellency will always advise with, and act in 
conformity to, the council of the officers of the said Honourable Com- 
pany." Treaties and Engagements loith Native Princes in India, Bengal, 
No. Ixi. p. 216. 



262 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

gomery's conception of the Creator's original produc- 
tion of the elements : 

" He called them when they were not, and they were." 

*' Your ancestors promised for you, in 1801, that you 
should govern well. You have not done so. I de- 
pose you; enough." That was all that was said to 
the ruler of Oude. 

Another case which I shall select is that of the 
titular Nawaub of the Carnatic. Prince Azeem Jah 
is the lineal representative of a line which was at a 
very early time conspicuous among the royal houses 
of India for its friendliness to the British power. 
Anwar- ood-deen-khan, the founder of the dynasty, 
died in battle for us against the French in 1749. To 
his successor, Walla Jah, we have it on the testimony 
of Sir T. Eumbold that we once owed our existence 
in the East. It was, indeed, at one time, on most 
insufficient grounds, suspected of this prince and of 
his son, that they had intrigued against us with 
Hyder Ali and Tippoo Sahib, who happened, by the 
way, to have been the hereditary foes of the family 
of Arcot. But it is not the less on record of Walla 
Jah, that to Louis Quinze of France, who sent an 
embassy with valuable presents to Arcot, seeking to 
detach him from our alliance, he replied, that, " in 
obedience to the commands of his father, he would 
never trust any other nation than the English." 
Walla Jah, at the conclusion of peace with the 
French, found, to his amazement, that, owing to the 
peculiar method of book-keeping, which in those 
times characterised the joint transactions of the East 
India Company with native princes, a war which he 
had undertaken far more for the benefit of his English 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 263 

allies than for his own, had left him prodigiously in 
their debt. However, as he allowed the claim, he 
must at least have the credit of having contributed 
to the establishment of our Indian supremacy an 
army and the sum of one or two millions of money. 
Xot content with his submissive generosity, the Com- 
pany, during his lifetime, and that of his son and 
successor, Omdut-al-Omrah, made several barefaced 
and ungrateful attempts to get, not only the revenues, 
but also the civil and military administration of the 
Carnatic into their own hands. Until the death of 
the latter, however, their importunities were baffled 
by the pertinacious dignity of both monarchs. But 
when Omdut-al-Omrah died, Lord Olive, instructed 
from Calcutta, at once proposed to Ali Houssain, the 
young heir of Omdut, the alternatives of making 
over the civil and military administration to the 
Madras government, or of seeing some more com- 
pliant relative mount in his stead to the musnud of 
his ancestors. Ali Houssain preferred his honour to 
his throne. It was plain that he could offer no resist- 
ance to the overwhelmino: streno;th of the Eno;lish : 
and his first cousin Azeem-al-Dowlah, having ac- 
cepted the base conditions of sovereignty, was in- 
stalled as Xawaub. With him was made the well- 
known treaty of 1801, which settled the succession 
to the Carnatic throne in Azeem, gave to the Com- 
pany the entire sway over the country, and left to 
the monarch himself nothino; but a titular sove- 
reignty, with one-fifth of the national revenues, as 
a provision for himself and his family. It is the 
stipulations of that treaty which the present claimant 
seeks to have executed in his own person. Azeem- 
al-Dowlah died in due time, and his son Azeem Jah 



264 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

succeeded him. The life of the latter was unevent- 
ful, as was that of his son Mahomed Ghouse Khan, 
who reigned after him until the year 1856. Ma- 
homed Ghouse Khan had come to the throne as a 
minor, and dying childless, should have been suc- 
ceeded by his uncle, Azeem Jah, the present claimant. 
Upon the death of his nephew, Azeem, as a matter 
of etiquette, wrote to the government of Madras, 
announcing his succession, and demanding its sanc- 
tion to his assumption of the throne. Much to his 
amazement, however, he received a reply to the effect 
that " the dynastic question must be referred to the 
Court of Directors for their consideration and award." 
The award of the Directors was simply a truly gener- 
ous allowance of a lac of rupees, and a sagacious 
abstinence from any reference whatever to the ques- 
tion of his succession. A further application upon 
the part of the expectant Nawaub to the Governor- 
General in Council was met with a refusal to discuss 
the merits of his case, or "to revoke the decision 
that had been passed." As no decision whatever 
had been passed, the use of the last phrase was a 
mere trick to treat that as settled, the settlement of 
which had been directly evaded. The Governor- 
General further observed that, as His Highness had 
memorialised the Court of Directors, he must await 
their reply. That reply he did await until the day 
of their extinguishment put a formal end to his 
chances of receiving it. Since then, however, he has 
fared but little better. He has, indeed, been insulted 
rather than tempted with repeated offers of a pecuni- 
ary allowance, and with exhortations to remain con- 
tent with regarding himself as the first gentleman of 
the Carnatic. But, as Ali Houssain, sixty years before 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 265 

him, refused to sacrifice the actual sovereignty to 
which he was born, so Azeem Jah, in a lower epoch 
of his family's history, persists, in spite of decaying 
age and extreme poverty, in his refusal to surren- 
der the titular honours that are still the appanages 
of his house. The assumption by the Queen of the 
government of India, and her express promise by 
proclamation, that all treaties of the East India Com- 
pany with native princes should be observed, gave 
a cruel spur to the hopes of Azeem. Mr. Layard 
mentioned his case in the House of Commons in 
1861, and msisted upon the fatuous injustice that 
had been done to him. Colonel Sykes supported Mr. 
Layard; and even Sir Charles Wood, acquiescing, 
agreed to go fully into his case. Conceding, of 
course, that Sir Charles has fulfilled his promise, one 
can only regret that the final estimate of so eminent 
a statesman should have been such as his subsequent 
refusal to take any action m the matter proves it to 
have been. 

We may regret the obstinacy of Government in 
this matter, especially because the boon asked is so 
triflmg, and because the bestowal of it might here- 
after prove to have been so very convenient. The 
refusal is inexplicable upon any grounds of state ex- 
pediency, and it is not founded on any pretence of 
personal disability. It is not as if Azeem Jah were 
askmg the substantial restitution of a realm. He 
asks only for a crown which, ten years since, his 
last ancestor wore, and for which it is as natural for 
him to sigh, as it is frivolous and irrational in us to 
mthhold it. It is precisely upon the insignificance 
of the effort which it would cost us, that the strength 
of the Nawaub's case may, from one point of \T.ew, 



266 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

be said to rest. It is not a hazardous plunge into 
the deeps, but a trip through the shallows of justice 
that is proposed to us. To seat Prince Azeem upon 
his powerless throne, would establish no perilous pre- 
cedent, involve no undefinable pledge, give us no 
difficult line to draw. His claim is neither too vast 
for arrangement, nor too antique for revival. With 
reference to the Queen's government, his recogni- 
tion would leave the Carnatic exactly where it was. 
So far as that point is concerned, it would but give 
to a palace an inhabitant with a titular right to 
reside in it. But it would also, by recognising the 
head of its royal house, give intense gratification to 
a race whose goodwill did much to stem the torrent 
of revolution in the late mutiny, and which may yet 
again, for ought we know, stand between us and 
extermination. It would raise a monarch whom we 
have thrust into the most cruel penury to the only 
affluence which he can accept with honour; and 
trivial as the act might seem at the time of doing 
it, it would hold out a dim hope to the great Hindoo 
houses, that our deeds in the past were not alto- 
gether irreversible, but that there was a future re- 
maining in which they might be redeemed. 

There is a vast territory now entirely subject 
to British rule in India, the acquisition of which it 
is as necessary to describe as to censure. It is 
known by the name of the Central Provinces. These 
provinces are of great extent : they stretch from 
Bundelcund on the north to the Madras presidency 
on the south, and from the frontier of Bengal on the 
east to Malwa and the Deccan on the west. Their 
extreme length from north to south may be com- 
puted at 500 miles, and their extreme breadth from 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 267 

east to west at 550 miles; their area is estimated 
at about 150,000 miles. It is worthy of notice that 
they are geographically and politically separated from 
the rest of British India, inasmuch as they are al- 
most entirely surrounded by native states, which are 
either absolutely independent, or, if under British 
administration, are still the nominal dominions of 
their titular sovereigns. On the north of the Central 
Provinces, for instance, lie the independent states of 
Bundelcund, Jehree, and Punnah; on the west, the 
Bhopaul state, the dominions of Scindia, Berar, and 
the country of the Nizam; on the south and south- 
east lies the Deccan again ; and on the east, Jeypore, 
an integral state, though administered from Fort St. 
George : the Eewa state is also contiguous upon the 
same frontier. " In general terms," says the Annual 
Report on their admmistration for the years 1861- 
1862, from which I have adapted this description, "the 
Central Provinces may be described as an extensive 
British territory situate in the very heart and centre 
of the Indian Peninsula, dissociated geographically 
and politically from the other British provinces; and 
though occasionally touching upon neighbouring Bri- 
tish districts, yet for the most part surrounded on 
all sides by foreign territory." This isolation and 
these frontiers will be important elements when we 
come to consider the ultimate destination and distri- 
bution of these Central Provinces. Their political 
history is very ancient and varied. They seem, if 
we may judge so from their traditions and from 
architectural remains, to have been the area over 
which several Hindoo dynasties and kingdoms, suc- 
cessive and contemporary, have flourished and de- 
cayed ; but in later and more historic times they 



268 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

were cut up into four kingdoms, of which the reign- 
ing families were of or akin to the Rajpoot race, and 
were called Gond-Eajpoots. As the Mohammedan 
rule absorbed the different parts of Central India, it 
attacked these Gond kingdoms in turn. The north- 
ernmost of the four, which had its capital at Mundla, 
near to the modern Jubbulpore, and extended over 
the greater part of the Nerbudda valley, managed 
for some time to retain a portion of its independence, 
though it lost many of its richer provinces. The 
southern kingdom also retained its existence, al- 
though it became a tributary of Delhi. The two 
midland kmgdoms, which had become united into 
one, were also rendered tributary; and their sove- 
reigns, either by force or through policy, embraced 
the Mohammedan religion. Eventually the Moham- 
medan princes of Malwa managed to get possession of 
the fairest portion of the jSTerbudda valley ; and the 
Mahratta province of Nagpore, which had groAvn to 
represent the midland kingdoms, was made a vice- 
royalty of the Deccan. As the Mohammedan empire 
broke up, and a general scramble for dominion took 
place among its great feudatories, and particularly 
as the tide of the fortunes of the Mahratta race rose 
and fell, the revolutions in these Central Provinces 
were like the changes in a kaleidoscope. Ultimately 
the House of Scindia became the possessors of a 
considerable portion of what had formerly been the 
northernmost of the four Gond kingdoms; and the 
rest of what now forms the British Central Provinces 
went to make up the kingdom which was so rapidly 
acquired and established by the great and fortunate 
Mahratta house of Bhonslah. It has been therefore 
from the Bhonslahs, whose capital was Nagpore, that 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 269 

we have acquired the greater part of these provmces, 
the chief cessions having been made at the termi- 
nation of the second Mahratta war. At the same 
time we received from Scindia those provinces of the 
northern kingdom which had previously passed into 
his possession; and the district thus acquired, united, 
went by the name of the Sangor and JN^erbudda ter- 
ritory. The remnant of the Bhonslah dominions in 
1818 consisted of the province of Nagj^ore itself. 
There had been a British resident at Nagpore since 
1803; and, from the accession of a minor in 1818, 
the admmistration of the state became British until 
the year 1830, when the young Rajah came of age 
and assumed the reins of government. This, the last 
of the Bhonslahs, died in 1853 without heirs begotten 
or adopted, and the kingdom lapsed to the British 
Government as lord paramount of India. 

The last sentence is composed of the few and 
simple words in which the Report which I have all 
along been following concludes the narrative of our 
acquisition of these provinces. But a word or two 
of amphfication is necessary to its material perfection. 
The manner in which the kingdom of the last of the 
Bhonslahs "lapsed" to the British Government was 
not very creditable; and, unfortunately, the trans- 
action was once again Lord Dalhousie's. It is true 
that the Maharajah Rughojee Bhonslah did die with- 
out heirs either begotten or adopted ; but he had all 
his life manifested in the most unequivocal manner 
his intention to adopt. He had even selected the 
object of his bounty in Yeshwunt Rao Aher Rao, 
the son of his niece and his nearest male relative. 
Of course, the act of adoption is one that a Hindoo 
naturally postpones until he has been forced to the 



270 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

conviction that he will beget no male heirs of his 
own. Rughojee Bhonslah died at the age of forty- 
seven years, before that conviction had grown on him. 
It happened to him, as it frequently does happen to 
Hindoos who die early, or comparatively early, in 
life, that this most important act of a childless man 
was left undone by him. But a Hindoo thus dying 
does not die in despair : he expires, on the contrary, 
in the full confidence that his senior widow will 
supply the deficiency, and will exercise the power 
which both law and custom gives her in such an 
emergency. In short, a man's widow may adopt for 
him, if he have not adopted; and this the senior 
widow of the Maharajah of Nagpore was prepared to 
do for him. But at this juncture, within a few weeks 
of the death of the Rajah, in stepped Lord Dalhousie. 
He calmly declared that '' the case of Nagpore was 
unprecedented ■'^ although it was absolutely the re- 
verse, and he knew it so to be. 

" We have before us," he wrote, ^^no question of an incomplete, 
or inchoate, or irregular adoption. The question of the right of 
Hindoo princes to adopt is not raised at all by recent events at 
Kagpore, for the Rajah has died, and has deliberately abstained 
from adopting an heir. The tvidow has adopted no successor. The 
state of Nagpore, conferred by the British Goyernment in 1818 
upon the Eajah and his heirs, has reverted to the British Govern- 
ment on the death of the Rajah without heirs. .... Justice 
and custom and precedent leave the Government wholly unfettered to 
decide as it thinks best. Policy alone must decide the question^ 

Now, unless it be proper charity to suppose that 
Lord Dalhousie and all his advisers were utterly 
ignorant of the important questions of fact and of 
Hindoo law raised on this occasion, one may say that 
all of the phrases which I have italicised are wilful 
falsifications of either fact or law. Let us take them 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 271 

one by one. And first those that bear upon the law. 
On this point it would be almost sufficient to say that 
every Hindoo jurist knows, and almost every body 
conversant with Hindoo society knows too, that the 
senior widow may adopt on behalf of her dead hus- 
band. Eegarded from a Hindoo standpoint, this is 
a maxim that is not only wise but indispensable to 
Hindoo society. It is a matter of religious belief 
that, unless a man's funeral rites are performed by a 
son, he will never get out of that transitional state 
between earth and paradise which is somewhat ana- 
logous to purgatory in Roman Catholicism, and more 
closely resembles the hither bank of the Styx m the 
old Greek and Latin religions. To say, therefore, 
that a Hindoo would deliberately abstain from adopt- 
ing an heir is sheer folly, unless you are to suppose 
that he is an infidel or a fool, with a taste for being 
indefinitely kept out in the cold. But there was no 
pretence for crediting Eughojee Bhonslah either with 
infidelity or with a fatuous rashness that would dis- 
regard the choice between Put and Paradise. He 
was simply dilatory, as men in mid-life too often are, 
in arranging his private affairs. His dilatoriness was 
probably aggravated by his knowledge that what he 
left undone his widow would complete. Nor can the 
Government in Lord Dalhousie's time be taken to 
have been ignorant of the law. For so far back as 
1826 Mr. Jenkins, the resident at Nagpore, had care- 
fully expounded it in an elaborate despatch, and had 
particularly insisted on the power given to a -widow 
to adopt. And again — for Lord Dalhousie is singu- 
larly unfortunate all through this Nagpore minute — 
the question was precisely one of " an inchoate or in- 
complete adoptiony For the lad whom the widow 



272 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

wished to adopt had been all along selected by the 
Eajah himself for the purpose. His mother, in anti- 
cipation, had been brought to the palace to give birth 
to him. A royal salute was fired in honour of the 
accouchement. His education was provided for and 
superintended by the Rajah. He had his household, 
and a complete set of courtiers was appointed to 
attend him. On all great occasions he occupied a 
seat of state on the right hand of his uncle. Im- 
mediately after the unexpected death of the Rajah, 
the senior widow obtained the consent of Yeshwunt 
Rao's father to the adoption. The young man per- 
formed his uncle's funeral rites. The only part of 
the adoption which was deferred was the investiture 
with a new name. This, along with the public pro- 
cession incidental to the ceremony, was postponed, 
out of courtesy to the Governor- General, until his 
formal sanction should be obtained. His answer to 
the demand for that sanction is fossilised in the 
astounding minute from which I have quoted. In 
the name of all that is ingenious, how is it possible 
to say, under the circumstances, that the case of 
Nagpore was '' unprecedented," that the Rajah had 
"deliberately abstained" from adopting an heir, that 
"custom, justice, or precedent left the British Go- 
vernment unfettered;" or, looking at the steps she 
had already taken, and to the fact that only a few 
weeks had then elapsed since the death of the Rajah, 
that his widow had not adopted, that is, had declined 
to adopt ! But Nagpore was annexed, and by its an- 
nexation a most convenient nucleus for a free native 
state in the future has been for the time destroyed. 
Let us hope that this act of Lord Dalhousie may yet 
be annulled; that Yeshwunt Rao may yet be made 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 273 

Maharajah, of Nagpore, under the same conditions as 
was his uncle, and that we may start fair and afresh 
once more. 

As might be supposed, the population of these 
central provinces, after such a history as theirs has 
been, is very varied and confused. So much so, that 
all antagonism of races and creeds seems happily 
impossible, at least in any sense that would impede 
their political distribution. It is also to be observed 
that, with the exception of the Bhonslah family and 
Scindia, there are no claimants existing for any part 
of the country. Were it to be erected into a mon- 
archy to-morrow, there would be no one aspirant to 
the crown with any thing like an antecedent right to 
priority of selection. The British, having acquired 
the country, administer it under what is known as 
the non-regulation system ; the same, in fact, as that 
which has hitherto prevailed in the Punjaub and in 
Oude. It is somewhat strange that th© most conve- 
nient division of the provinces for the purposes of 
administration has been found to be into four dis- 
tricts or commissionerships, which answer roughly to 
the four Gond kingdoms, into which they were so 
lono^ ao;o distributed. 

A review of what has been called the meaner 
method of dealing with Indian princes would be in- 
complete, if the examples were confined to cases of, 
territorial confiscation. There have been illustrious 
accomplishments of a still lower ingenuity. Exiled 
or deposed monarchs and their families have been 
robbed of money, jewels, and securities for money 
by legal quibbles which the Treasury of India has 
laid hold of in moments of extreme rapaciousness or 
unusual impecuniosity. One out of these cases only 

T 



274 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

need be selected. It is one which is peculiarly dis- 
graceful to the India House. To describe it will be 
to hold up all like it to the disgust of a nation like 
the English — a nation whose faults have generally 
been upon an imperial scale, and whose very sins may 
cry out against being placed side by side with jietti- 
fogging iniquity. The Kajah of Coorg in 1834, partly 
by his own petulance, but not altogether without a 
show of right on his side, became involved in a war 
with the East India Company. The consequences of 
this complication were decisive and fatal to him. He 
himself, in a petition to Her Majesty, has concisely 
described this incident in his life. " The armies of 
the Company," he says, '' entered his territory. To 
the general commanding those armies your petitioner 
surrendered, without wasting life in a useless contest. 
He was at once deposed from his sovereignty, his ter- 
ritories were seized, his revenues confiscated, and he 
himself brought prisoner of war to Benares." That- 
was all pretty well for having dared to show temper ; 
especially when Ave consider that he was the nephew 
and heir of a man of whom it could be said, even with 
a moderate amount of exaggeration, that, " in the 
contest in which the English finally triumphed over 
their most formidable enemy the Sultan Tippoo Sahib, 
the part taken by your petitioner's uncle determined 
the issue of the conflict, and secured by the overthrow 
of the Sultan the ascendency of British power in the 
Mysore." But this was not all. At the time of his 
deposition, and for some years previous to it, the 
Eajah held two promissory notes of the Indian Go- 
vernment, for sums deposited in the public funds, 
amounting to 857,840 rupees, or 85,784^. For these 
the Rajah, when living as a private person at Benares, 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 275 

demanded pa}Tiient in the ordinary way. The Go- 
vernment refused then, and they have refused ever 
since, to pay him either principal or interest, on the 
ground that by levying war against the Company he 
had forfeited both. Now, in the first place, he had 
not levied war against the Company; the Company 
levied war against him. They objected to his de- 
meanour and to his style of government; and, irri- 
tated at last by the tone in which he demanded the 
extradition of certam members of his family who had 
fled from his displeasure into British territory, they 
proclaimed his deposition, and proceeded to occupy 
his dominions. Of course, he defended himself as 
long as he could, as any man of common spirit would 
have done; but that was all; and under all the cir- 
cumstances it can hardly be said that he levied war 
against the Company. At all events, if self-defence 
is lev}dng war, it will never do for an Indian poten- 
tate to hold money in the Anglo-Indian funds. For 
if ever the amount he so held were to amount to more 
than an attack upon him would cost, he would run 
the risk of a declaration of war against him; and if 
he raised a regiment in his own defence, of an imme- 
diate declaration of forfeiture. This is, indeed, a new 
way to pay old debts ! It is just worth while here to 
say that no formal forfeiture of the principal, and no 
sequestration of the interest of these promissory notes 
was ever made. The interest has all along been 
suffered to accumulate, and amounts at this time, 
with the principal, to about 220,000/., the annual 
value of the whole being about 12,000/. It is more 
important, if we regard the moral aspect of the case, 
to notice that the money was not money lent by the 
Rajah himself, but by his uncle. The Rajah sued the 



276 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

Government in Chancery for the amount; but the 
Master of the Rolls held that the seizure was not an 
act that could be called in question in a municipal 
court. Nor was it. It was an act of sovereign power 
over the property of a hostile alien ; and whether or 
not it was justifiable is a question of international, 
not municipal law. The question is, whether the 
private property of a hostile alien situated in the 
enemy's country ought or ought not to be confis- 
cated by the sovereign of that country. All the 
writers on international law, from Grotius and Byn- 
kershoeck downwards, combine to say that, although 
it was the custom so to do in ancient times, yet a 
more enlightened philosophy has brought about a 
more gentle and humane usage ; and that the conduct 
of European nations has been against the old habit. 
The later history of international law only goes to 
strengthen this doctrine ; and it is now settled usage 
that such property is not confiscated. We must bear 
in mind too that there are at least four kinds of pro- 
perty which a hostile alien may happen to hold at the 
breaking out of war. First, there is real property, 
which he holds with the consent of the sovereign; 
secondly, there is personal property, which he may 
possess in a hundred different ways; thirdly, there 
are debts which may be due to him from private in- 
dividuals; fourthly, there are debts which may be 
due to him from the nation, and such are moneys 
in the public funds. The first two of these classes 
of property it is simply inhuman to confiscate ; 
but to touch one or the other of the two last is to 
add to inhumanity the crimes of dishonesty and in- 
justice. We have therefore an ascending series of 
wrong. It is barbarous to take real or personal pro- 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 277 

perty which is not in the nature of a debt. But it is 
barbarous and dishonest both to confiscate what either 
individuals or the public may have contracted to pay 
to an alien who had trusted either before he had the 
misfortune to quarrel with his debtors. And again, 
if there be a distinction in wickedness to be drawn 
between the confiscation of a private and that of a 
public debt, then the confiscation of the latter must 
be held to be the worst ; for by it the honour of the 
nation is directly compromised; while by the former 
the good name of a private citizen only is at stake. 
The credit of the mass is a greater matter to jeo- 
pardise than that of any individual composing the 
mass, simply because the whole is greater than a 
part. The very latest writer on international law 
has thus epitomised its condition upon this question. 
He says : 

" With regard to the shares held by a government or its sub- 
jects in the public funds of another, all modern authorities agree, 
we believe, that they ought to be safe and inviolate. To confiscate 
either principal or interest would be a breach of good faith, and 
would injure the credit of a nation and of its public securities." 

Up to this doctrine we do act in Europe. One in- 
stance is as good as a thousand. The late Emperor 
Nicholas of Eussia, at the outbreak of the Crimean 
war, was a large holder of English securities. We 
did not confiscate them. But we do confiscate the 
rupees of the Rajah of Coorg. Why? Because, as 
has been said before, we are cautious and law-fearing 
in Europe, where our neighbours are strong ; we are 
bold and high-handed in Asia, where our neighbours 
are weak. 

Into minor acts of spoliation I need not go. There 
are other names, such as Tanjore, Sattara, and Jhansi, 



278 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

each of which has its own special connotation of mean 
and shameless ingenuity ; and but too many of them 
are the lurid stars that glow in Dalhousie's coronet 
of questionable fame. Not one of the transactions 
which they recall, except the settlement of the Pun- 
jaub, has a redeeming element, I refrain from nar- 
rating them all, only because there is a tedium even 
in the variety of dishonour. I have written enough 
to induce the honest reader to seek for fuller infor- 
mation, and to challenge the apologists of the past to 
come forward and defend it. Nor have I taken my 
views at second-hand. The state papers on India are 
eminently accessible, and the state culprits of India, 
secure in the apathy or confident of the selfishness of 
the generations for whom their casuistry was exerted, 
have been from first to last an unusually candid race. 
Their own mouths and pens are the chief accusers of 
most of them, and there is no question of false wit- 
ness, of uncomprehended statesmanship, or of per- 
verted renown. 

II. 

Enough has now been said to remind us how we 
have amassed our dominions in India; and it is time 
to pass on and to consider the consequences of their 
acquisition. It must not be supposed that the evils 
of the conquest are represented by a mere change of 
sovereignty. While, on the one hand, it will not do 
to approach this subject in the spirit of a doctrinaire, 
on the other one must not be supposed so to approach 
it. If the East India Company had been a native 
state, or if the territories of the East India Company 
had been governed by a native agency, with one or 
two European ofiicers at its head, the expansion of 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 279 

those territories would have mattered Httle, and the 
declaration of the Company's paramountcy still less. 
It is a comparatively unimportant matter which is 
paramount in a community of states where a head is 
necessary, provided that the office, in the possession 
of any special occupant, is not altered inconveniently 
or disastrously in its conditions. I do not care much 
how long the King or Queen of Great Britain may 
retain the title of Emperor or Empress of India. But, 
unfortunately, it is not the assumption of title, nor 
even the absorption of territory, that has rendered 
the growth of the English power in India ruinous to 
Indian society. We have insisted upon administering 
all we have conquered, all we have absorbed. And 
our administration has not been confined to the higher 
state offices, the appropriation of which was probably 
essential to the maintenance of our position as con- 
querors. But we have percolated, as it were, through 
almost all the channels and cells of the social and 
governmental system, to all except the very smallest 
and lowest, filling all that we have not destroyed. I 
will not now complain that we recklessly swept away 
or ignored certain ancient forms of social and political 
life, without giving them a chance of success under 
the orderly times which we had restored. Although 
it ought to be remembered that we came upon the 
vast stage of India at an epoch of disorder and revo- 
lution ; at a time when no spectator could pass a 
fair judgment upon Indian institutions. It was the 
coincidence of this epoch with our appearance that 
rendered our empire possible, and we should have 
been in the highest degree careful not to confound 
the upset of the dynasty that preceded us with a 
necessity for superseding the political and social fabric 



280 ENGLAND AND INDIA.' 

over wMch it had extended. But with the hastiness 
with which we proclaimed the greater revolution, 
when to have been content with but a little more 
than a mere change of suzerainty would have been 
wiser as well as juster, I do not now wish to deal. 
Granted that the changes we introduced were benefi- 
cial, why did we monopolise their execution, and that 
not temporarily, but with full intention of perpetuity ? 
Why, by our assumption of every state duty worth 
performance, of every public office and post of emolu- 
ment worth holding, did we close up every avenue to 
ambition, and destroy every incentive to worth, every 
motive for patriotism, to the Indian populations? By 
a persistence in this fundamental error we were ex- 
tirpating, as surely as if we had put poison about for 
them — as some of the early settlers in Australia did 
for the natives there — the upper and middle classes 
of India. For it is beyond question that the upper 
and middle classes, properly so called, must die out 
of a country in which there is nothing for them to do. 
A class dies out when its distinctive occupation is no 
more. It merges from very objectlessness into an 
uniformity with what is around it. Nature will not 
go on in a pertinacious supply of the useless. Tie up 
a limb and its muscles disappear. It is a mere truism 
to say that as exercise is the cause of development, so 
inaction is that of decay. In this case it has been the 
decay of intellect and morality, of the double-sided 
worth that distinguishes man from man and class 
from class. We have arranged a system under which 
intellect and morality have been needless to the Hin- 
doo, save so far as some form or extent of one, or 
both, may have been necessary to enable him to 
amass or maintain a fortune, to get a livelihood, or 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 281 

keep him within the bounds of the law. We have 
releo-ated the kino- to his harem, the noble to his 
hunting-grounds, and have confined every class below 
them to the getting and spending of money. All who 
mio^ht have been p'ood and active amono^ the citizens 
of India have been without scope, hope, object, or a 
career. From end to end of the Peninsula the popu- 
lation will, unless our system either be changed by 
our o^vn acts of reform, or come to an end in a con- 
vulsion, become one vast lower class, whose members 
will be to be distinguished simply by the adjectives 
"rich" and "poor." 

It would not be out of place if I were to fortify 
what I have said here by quoting the opinion of Sir 
John Malcolm on this very subject. In his famous 
Circular of Instructions to Officers acting under his 
orders in Central India, he says : 

" The want of union among the natives appears one of the 
strongest foundations of our power ; it has certainly contributed 
beyond all others to its establishment. But when we trace this 
cause, we find it to haye originated in the condition in which we 
found India, and the line we adopted towards its inhabitants; 
that it will continue to operate when the condition of that country 
is changed, and under any alteration in our course of proceedings, 
is more than can be assumed. The similarity of the situation of 
the great proportion of the people of this continent now subject 
to our rule will assuredly make them more accessible to common 
motives of action, which is the foundation of all union ; and the 
absence of that necessity for conciliation, which changes have 
effected, will make us more likely to forget its importance. Om' 
power has hitherto owed much to a contrast with misrule and 
oppression ; but this strength we are daily losing : we have also 
been indebted to an indefinite impression of our resources, ori- 
ginating in ignorance of their real extent ; knowledge will bring 
this feeling to a reduced standard. We are supported by the 
good opinion of the lower and middling classes, to whom our 
Government is indulgent ; but it has received the rudest shocks 



282 EiS^GLAND AND INMA. 

from an impression that om- system of rule is at variance with 
the permanent continuance of rank, authority, or distinction in 
any native of India. This belief, which is not without foundation, 
is general to every class ; and its action leaves but an anxious 
and feverish existence to all who enjoy station and high name : 
.... this is a danger to our power which must increase in the 
ratio of its extent, unless we can counteract its operation by a 
commensurate improvement of our administration." 

Of course it will be noticed that Sir John Mal- 
colm insists on the evil of this condition of things 
as a source of danger to our pov/er. I prefer to 
regard it as an element ruinous to Indian society. 

I know that it will be objected to what I have 
been saymg, first, that we do throw open office to 
the Hindoos ; and secondly, that we do educate them, 
or try to educate them, and that they themselves 
assist our efforts, some by coming to Europe for 
study, and many by frequentiug the schools which 
we supply in India. I know that, by a section in an 
Act of Parliament of the year 1833, it was enacted 
that neither race nor creed should thenceforth dis- 
qualify any natural-born subject of the British Crown 
for any office whatever, civil or military, within the 
length and breadth of the Peninsula. I know too, 
that, in the Proclamation made by Her Majesty on 
her assumption of the empire, the same principle was 
enunciated ; and that it was subsequently reduced 
into form in the Act for the better government of 
India. • I do not desire to suppose that I am advo- 
cating any new principle. On the contrary, I claim 
its preexistence as my sanction; and I point to its 
antiquity and its barrenness in the past, and ask that 
it should be made more fruitful in the future. As 
matters stand now, and as the present system is 
worked, who knows or thinks of the principle ? What 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 283 

are the offices which at this moment are practically, 
not theoretically, open to Hindoos? Are they not 
different in kind from, and lower in kind than, those 
of which the English Civil Service in India generally 
is composed? Is it practically possible for a young 
native gentleman, however intelligent, however highly 
born or highly educated he may be, to enter upon 
the same line of promotion, and to start at the same 
point, as a young Englishman proceeding to India? 
What would be thought of it, if a young Hindoo or 
Mohammedan were to make his appearance as a can- 
didate at one of the competitive examinations ? And 
yet, why should he not? and why should not the 
contingency of his success be hailed, and the chances 
of it encouraged ? If we msh to inoculate India at 
large with our principles of law and government, of 
social and political morality, why should we not hail 
individual and personal evidences of the fulfilment of 
our wish ? One Hindoo proved, by the test of an ex- 
amination in competition mth our youth at home, to 
have been Europeanised in acquirements — we might 
then take some change in his instincts too for granted 
— would be a significant unit gained towards the aggre- 
gate of a regenerated India. Seriously, why should not 
a proclamation in specific terms be once more made 
throughout the Peninsula, that Indians, without re- 
gard to nationalities or religions, are eligible for Civil 
Service appointments ? Why not also immediately 
set to work to give young Indian candidates proper 
opportunities of fitting themselves for such posts ? It 
would plainly be a mere farce to force them all to 
come over to Europe to study and to compete; why 
not, then, institute boards of examiners in India, and 
reserve every year for the native candidates a grow- 



284 ENGLA^^D AND INDIA. 

ing proportion of appointments out of every batch of 
vacancies? There are several native colleges under 
governmental management in India ; and it would be 
perfectly easy to distribute among them all, or among 
certain of them that should be selected for the pur- 
pose as convenient centres, the vacancies reserved 
for India. Suitable subjects for examination might 
be fixed and announced, and special opportunities 
for education in them might be provided in fit and 
proper places. At the same time, any native who 
chose, and who could afford to make such an election, 
might compete in London in the ordinary way. So 
too, if Enghshmen chose to compete at the native 
colleges, they might be allowed to do so; and by 
this means an important opportunity would be given 
to the sons of civil and military ofiicers resident m 
India, whose fathers could not afford to send them 
home. Year by year, as the number of qualified na- 
tive candidates increased, and as the success of the 
experiment manifested itself, the number of vacancies 
reserved for the native colleges might be increased ; 
and as time went on, the question would arise, whe- 
ther or not the days of the examinations in London 
for English candidates ought not to be considered 
numbered. 

No doubt this proposition is to be considered as 
one for the eventual extinction of the English Civil 
Service in India. It is meant to be so. The aim and 
object that shapes all I have to say is, India for the 
Indians. I desire nothing less, and should be con- 
tent with nothing less. That it may be compassed I 
feel certain. That it ought to be one of the grand 
duties which England should set herself, in order to 
bring about an equihbrium in her history and her 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 285 

fame, I know. It may be done without abruptness ; 
without loss of peace; without sacrifice of strength 
or dignity; without political or commercial disad- 
vantage to ourselves; and lastly (and this is the 
most important consideration), without risk to those 
inceptive improvements in the moral, social, and poli- 
tical condition of India, of which the last few years 
have undoubtedly seen the inauguration. 

There is something to fill the heart of a patriotic 
and conscientious Englishman with a happy relief, 
when he contemplates the future action which is pos- 
sible for his country in India. When he looks back 
over the pages that tell the story of the last one hun- 
dred years, and reads all that may be laid to the 
charge of the very noblest among his countrymen; 
when he reads of wars and treaties so full of the old 
flavour of glory that he has to struggle hard lest he 
should be dra^vn away by the flush of a mistaken 
pride ; and when he sinks back, after the perusal of 
the record, sick at, heart with his own reluctance to 
condemn, his own inability to admire, — it is, I say, 
matter of the happiest emotion when he comes to 
reflect on what the end may yet be. It is possible 
so to shape the later phases of the English occupation 
of India as to make them more than atone for the 
past, to make the end a noble apology for the begin- 
ning. There need be no decline of the English power 
through effeteness and decay ; no fall of it by a sud- 
den uprising; neither the one nor the other to leave 
a tale to posterity of a stupendous but mean ambition 
lying for a while athwart the true stream of Asiatic 
history. On the contrary, it will be that the higher 
and nobler the exercise of the English power grows, 
the nearer will dawn the day of its Avithdrawal — not 



286 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

from decay or by expulsion, but by the mere force of 
its own best elements, by the manifestation of its own 
intentions, the happy effects of its own magnitude 
and benevolence, by the sanction of its own results, 
the convictions of its own possessors. It is possible 
for the English so to handle their own destiny ; so in- 
sensibly to work out on an imperial scale what is just 
and honourable and wise in policy, as to let the slow 
change escape the very observation of the world, until 
the day when they shall say, " We are able now to 
leave India, because our work is done.'^ 

A noble final cause is thus claimed for our future 
government of India. But it involves a destiny for 
its different services which too many of their mem- 
bers, and too many of those who take an interest in 
them, would be unwilling to accept. To take the 
Civil Service, for instance, of which we have just 
been speaking. There is no doubt that ever since 
its formation it has been exposing a field of growing 
extent for the lucrative employment of energetic and 
ambitious young English gentlemen. As its many 
seductions to the nobler spirits among us are mani- 
fest, so too its many recommendations to the meaner 
are no less to be understood. It is a sphere of life in 
which the love of power and the love of opulence can 
both be gratified. It is free from the sordiclness of the 
mercantile, and from the drudgery and the chances 
of long dullness of the military life. It is indepen- 
dent, cheerful, honourable, even brilliant, and it pays 
well. Its extent, and in consequence the great num- 
bers of the aspirants whom it is capacious enough to 
satisfy, make its permanence seem a matter of na- 
tional importance. It looks, and indeed it is, a valu- 
able outlet for the youth of the country. One can 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 287 

easily see, therefore, how an institution which should 
be the means thereto, is turned hito the bar against 
the regeneration of India. In the minds of a vast 
number of really well-meaning and honest men, it 
loses its character and intention as a means to an end, 
and becomes the end itself. They no longer say, 
" We shall send out our sons, as we have long sent 
them, to found and confirm a good system of govern- 
ment, until the Xatives have learnt it thoroughly and 
can carry it on for themselves;" but they say, "We 
camiot associate the Xatives with us in the govern- 
ment on equal terms ; still less can we do so with a 
view of giraig it up to them altogether, when they 
can be trusted with it ; for what in that case would 
become of our sons?" If it were not for their honesty 
and unconsciousness, one would say that they were 
like the masters of the damsel of Thyatira protesting 
against the cure of her insanity, because the hope of 
their gains would go. But their fears, such as they 
are, are practically groundless. The effect of trans- 
ferring thus the Civil Service to Xatives would be so 
gradual that it would never be felt in England. There 
would be no throwmg out of employ, no frustration 
of hfelong ■\T.ews or professional intentions. It would 
simply be that year by year the number of vacancies 
would become, by slight degrees, fewer and fewer, 
and that the number of candidates for them and of 
youths educated for the candidateship would foUow 
the decrease. On the one hand, it would be the 
old story of supply and demand ; and on the other, 
it is undoubted that when one avenue of life closes 
against a generation another invariably and immedi- 
ately opens out. 

Once decree this revolution m the Civil Service, 



288 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

and the real pacification of India will be more than 
half achieved. That superficial quiet, that apparent 
content, that thin crust of deceitful verdure over the 
smouldering volcano, of which we hear so much, 
would be made deep, real, and trustworthy. The 
concealed hate, the inner fires, would die down at 
once. No surer guarantee for the future could pos- 
sibly be given to the upper and middle classes of 
every race and nationality in the Peninsula. By this 
equal association in the government we should gain 
them, as by mildness and beneficence of rule we have 
now gained their inferiors. It would only remain 
for us to conciliate the rulers and the higher grades 
of the nobility. And what is here said of the Civil 
Service, technically so called, is of course to be ex- 
tended to all those other branches of the public ser- 
vice which are not included among those the entrance 
to which is through the portals of a competitive 
examination. Whatever magisterial, judicial, or exe- 
cutive function is open to the merit of an Englishman 
should be really open, on the same terms, to a Native. 
Or rather, I would go beyond that. Where a Native 
actually eligible for any such post can be found, he 
ought to be first. The choice of an European should 
only be made in default of such a Native being forth- 
coming. The test of this preference, as indeed of all 
occasions similar to it, being the one maxim, which 
should always be adduced, " India for the Indians." 

It is impossible to question the certainty that the 
introduction of English justice, as it is now repre- 
sented, into Indian courts has been an inestimable 
blessing to the country. It is one of those facts to 
which the apologists of our occupation naturally leap. 
Nor need any body, whatever his opinions on the 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 289 

past or hopes for the future may be, shrink from pay- 
ing to it the fullest measure of respect. Its funda- 
mental drawbacks have been, the monopoly of its 
administration by Eurojoeans, so long and so per- 
versely maintained; and also its institution, as ex- 
plained below, without reference to or connection 
with the ancient social system of India. There is 
no need to recall the earlier days of the coUectorates, 
when mercantile gentlemen, with no particular sala- 
ries, who had to make their fortunes as best they 
might, combined so happily in their own persons the 
fimctions of the extortioner and his judge. Those 
times passed away for ever as soon as the high- 
minded Cornwalhs took the matter into his reforming 
hands.* Since then there has been nothing to record 
in the history of Anglo-Indian judicature, except 
attempts that have been always creditable, even 
when mistaken; and an almost constant progress has 
been maintained in the direction of that complete- 
ness and settlement which every body acknowledges 
to be still far from being attained. Many persons 
are eminently dissatisfied both with the judicial sys- 
tem now at work in India and with the manner in 
which it is administered. I confess that, so far as I 
dare to forpi an opinion on such a subject, at so great 
a distance and from books, without personal experi- 
ence, I am not. inclined to share either form of that 
dissatisfaction. As to the system itself, I do not 
detect any such organic difference between the old 
native judicial constitution and that which we have 
substituted for it as justifies condemnation. Indeed, 
placed side by side, the two have a wonderful simi- 

* It will be seen subsequently that I have not forgotten one tem- 
porary interruption to this change. 

U 



290 EIs^GLAND AND INDIA. 

larity. The old system was certainfy more symme- 
trical, and that in proportion as it harmonised the 
more completely with the general structure of Hin- 
doo society, springing upward from and based upon 
the "village." It was a graduated series of six courts. 
Of these, the three lowest may be called village or 
municipal courts, and the three highest courts of 
state. They all seem to have tried civil and crimi- 
nal causes indiscriminately, and each one acted as a 
court of appeal from those below it. It is well known 
that the basis of Indian society was the village. The 
whole of the state was cut up into villages, each of 
which was a complete though a petty republic. These 
village communities were subdivided by trades and 
families. It is easy to understand how the village 
and its subdivisions provided the materials for no 
less than three courts. The lowest and smallest of all 
the subdivisions, the family or tribe, had its assem- 
bly called Cula, for settling in a rude and familiar 
fashion disputes between tho.se connected by blood. 
From the decisions of this body there was an appeal 
to one formed upon a larger basis, the assembly of 
trades or artisans.* This last was a convention of 
persons belonging possibly and probably to different 
tribes, but subsisting by the same trade;. in fact, it 
was a court of guild. Its name was Svene. Above 
these there was the court of the village, composed of 
the townsmen at large, and of all trades and families 
alike, and called Pugu. This was the supreme tri- 
bunal of the little republic, and, in common with its 
two inferiors, it bore the name of Punchayet. Strange 

■"' I doubt whether all the decisions of the Cula were so appealable. 
Suits purely relating to family affairs would more naturally, if appealed 
at all, be taken to the general court of the village. 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 291 

calls all the three, assemblies of arbitration. Next 
beyond and above them came the lowest of the three 
courts of state. This was the tribunal of the local 
judge. Each of the local judges had his own proper 
district, and a stationary court. He heard appeals 
from the Punchayet, but was also a court of original 
jurisdiction. It was perfectly competent for any 
suitor to commence an action in the district court, 
in preference to either of the three lower ones ; but 
it is important to know and to remember tliat it was 
rather the habit of the villagers to settle every thing, 
that could so be settled, before the petty tribunals. 
Above the local judge was the tribunal of the chief 
judge, who was also a crown officer, and had three 
or more assessors. His was also a stationary court, 
and was held at a stated place, usually the capital. 
Last of all, the supreme and ultimate tribunal was 
the court of the sovereign in person, who heard causes 
assisted by learned Brahmms. His court was ambu- 
latory, and was held wherever for the time bemg he 
sojourned or abode. 

Such was the system which we found, in decay 
perhaps, but still in existence, when we came upon 
India. It is probable that even in the best of the 
Hmdoo or Mogul times the three village courts were 
far the most frequented and the most useful. It is 
not easy to conceive that so vast a country as India, 
filled with a simple agricultural people, whose means 
of locomotion must have been as uninviting as their 
dislike of it was strong, could ever have experienced 
any thing like a working centralisation in civil or 
criminal justice. And, in this view, the higher of 
the two state judges would have had little to do 
with causes that did not arise within something like 



292 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

the neighbourhood of the cajjital at which he sat. 
The local or district courts being more numerous, 
and dealing with a smaller area, were doubtless better 
resorted to ; on the other hand, it must have been a 
monarch of unusual energy, and leisure from war, who 
could make judicial pilgrimages over Hindoostan, 
from the Indus to the Bay of Bengal, not to speak 
of any dominions he might have south of the Yindyan 
Eange. It is not possible to imagine any such sove- 
reign riding about, redressing people's wrongs mth 
any thing like the regularity suilicient to make his 
court an element in the every-day considerations of a 
people so numerous as the Hindoos, and spread over 
so vast an area. On the contrary, it is probable that 
beyond the district courts, at the farthest, litigation 
seldom proceeded, and even that the three courts of 
the village practically formed the limits of judgment 
and arbitration to the inhabitants of the village. 

To Englishmen, coming as the first conquerors of 
India came, from a highly centralised society, and 
from a country where rough-and-ready tribunals were 
unknown, and where a quarrel about a field or a 
blow in the face could only be adjudicated by the 
direct representative of the monarch, it was no doubt 
a scandal, and seemed lilvC anarchy, that the superior 
courts should be disused, and that justice should 
find her daily seat among a knot of half-naked vil- 
lagers on the floor of a hut, or under the shade of a 
large tree. I say this, not with reference to the first 
representatives of English judicature in India — of 
whom it is needless either to think or to speak — but 
in reference to those ideas vv^hich probably actuated 
Lord Cornwallis and his advisers in the changes 
which they introduced. Lord Cornwallis thought 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 293 

to make superior courts wHch should be more useful 
and more accessible than that of the old native Pra- 
drivaca and of the sovereign. A wise notion, no 
doubt, but not all that should have been done. He 
accordmgly retained the district or local courts, and 
established provincial courts above them, differing 
from the Pradrivacd, in that they were numerous, 
and were also courts of circuit. He also established 
the supreme civil and criminal courts at Calcutta. 
Lord William Bentinck found that the provincial 
courts had become utterly effete and worse than use- 
less; that they were filled systematically with the 
mediocrities of the civil serwce, for whom they were 
sought as comfortable sinecures, in which they were 
not expected to do any good, and could not well do 
any harm. The fact was, that the revenue collec- 
tors, the main tradition of whose office was universal 
sway in the district over which it extended, had 
always been avowedly encroaching on the domain of 
the provincial bench ; an institution which had shorn 
them of half their impunity and power. Lord Wil- 
liam Bentmck, urged probably to the step by the 
collectors themselves, or by higher members of the 
civil service, who would of course advocate the ag- 
grandisement of so large a section of their own body, 
and at the same time accepting the imbecility of the 
provincial judges in confirmation of such solicitations, 
abolished the latter, and made the collectors judges 
of circuit. This was plainly an error, and a mere 
recurrence to the old union of the judicial and 
executive functions, which had been so fruitful of 
evil before the days of Cornwalhs. Lord William 
Bentinck, however, soon revoked his false step, and 
made the local or district judges judges of circuit; 



294 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

thus combining into one the two benches of Lord 
Cornwallis. He then made the collectors magistrates 
within their own coUectorates, giving to them the 
less important part of the duties of the district 
judges, and relieving the latter of the small causes, 
which would have embarrassed them in the exercise 
of their more extended functions. He also created 
a court of appeal for the north-west provinces, thus 
relieving the inhabitants Cf that part of India from 
making a journey to Calcutta. But better, per- 
haps, even than this last was his institution of prin- 
cipal Sudder Ameens ; native judges with district 
courts of original jurisdiction in civil cases, subject 
to appeal to the European courts. A lower kind 
of native judge than these had previously existed, 
and it was from them that he took his notion of the 
higher native tribunal. So well did his experiment 
answer, that in 1843 similar courts were created 
to try criminal cases. With the exception of his 
one mistake of confusing the executive with the 
judicial function. Lord William Bentinck's changes 
were real reforms; and his system, mth certain ad- 
ditions rendered necessary by the increase of busi- 
ness, and changes effected with a view to uniformity, 
forms our present establishment.* 

Few experiments have been so successful in Lidia 
as the creation of the principal Sudder Ameens, both 
civil and criminal; and their success points, as it 
were with two hands, the path we ought to pursue. 
Employ the I^atives, first because it is just, secondly 
because it is advantageous. There is no more reason 
why the highest offices of the judicature should not 

* The great redistribution of the higher jnclgeships was made by 
the 24: & 25 Yictoria, cap. 104. 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 295 

in time be filled by them than there is against their 
gradually acquiring all the executive posts. The 
bar is now professedly open to them, and native bar- 
risters practise at Calcutta. And it is from native 
barristers that the district judgeships first, and as time 
goes on, the higher judgeships of appeal, should be 
filled up.* Not, of course, until there are natives 
fit to take such posts, but as soon as ever there are. 
There should be no limit to the prospects of this 
revolution. As soon as possible, the chief justice- 
ships of Bengal and the other provinces should be 
filled by native gentlemen; and, as I said of the 
executive civil service, I say of the bench. Hail the 
contingency of its monopoly by natives ; hasten the 
advent of that contingency. As I advocated colleges 
and boards of examiners for native candidates for 
the covenanted civil ser^T.ce, so I advocate analogous 
institutions for the education of native students for 
the various bars of India. Why not, for instance, 
at Calcutta, Madras, Agra, and Bombay, found insti- 
tutions so far resembling our Inns of Court as might 
be applicable to the circumstances of India? Pro- 
vide professors, institute prizes, confer the degree 
of advocacy; do all that may be necessary to attract 
natives of good position to the practice of the bar. 
Let them know, as the young law-student of Lon- 
don, Dubhn, and Edinburgh knows, that the highest 
law-offices are the prizes of his profession, and the 
goal towards which his ambition may extend itself. 
In the law, as in the civil service, let the Hindoo run 
a race with the Briton, and take care that he is put 
into a position to start fair. 

* It is satisfactory to know that one Native has already been ap- 
pointed to a judgeship of the high court of Fort William in Bengal. 



296 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

Two very right and proper steps in the direction 
of associating natives of good position with the higher 
functions of government have within the last few 
years been taken. One of these is the gift of magis- 
terial powers to the Talookdars of Oude and the 
Jagheerdars of the Pnnjaub. The gentlemen thus 
selected are raised, so far as judicial power can raise 
them, to a position as honourable among their neigh- 
bours as that of an English landowner bearmg Her 
Majesty's commission as justice of the peace. The 
annual reports of all those officers of the European 
Civil Service whose duties have brought them within 
view of the operation of this experiment, vie with 
each other in congratulating the country on its suc- 
cess. It is difficult to say which is greater or which 
is more important, — the popularity of the measure 
or the benefits conferred by it. The second and no 
less beneficial and popular act has been the election 
of native members to serve, for the purpose of mak- 
ing laws and regulations, in the State Councils in the 
diffisrent principalities. In the Council of India, out 
of eleven members, four are natives; in the Council 
of Madras, out of seven members, two are natives; 
and in the Council of Bombay, out of eight members, 
three are natives. It is to be regretted that there are 
no native members of the Council of the Governor- 
General of India. To place two or three of high 
rank and intelligence upon that Council would be to 
pave the way for their employment as lieutenant- 
governors of the principalities, which would be a 
most desirable result. We have done much in the 
direction of giving due employment and paying pro- 
per respect to natives of high social position during 
the last few years ; and all we have done has brought 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 297 

about results which not only encourage, but enforce 
us to do more. Every proof thus given of the capa- 
city of the higher classes of Hindoos for government 
is an excuse taken away from us for a refusal to 
concede it to them. The day will soon dawn when 
nothmg but such a selfish repugnance to part from 
power as by that time, it is to be hoped, we shall 
have completely shaken from us, will prevent us from 
filling the very highest state offices with Hindoos. At 
present we have neither freed ourselves entirely from 
this selfishness, nor have we entirely overcome that 
evil pride of race which was so hateful to the generous 
and philosophic mmd of Sir John Malcolm in his day. 
We shall probably end by riddmg ourselves of both 
the selfishness and the pride, and come to look back 
upon both feelings as he did, — as disfigurements of 
the past, to be recollected only with shame. ^ 

But there is one point in our judicial system upon 
which most Indian reformers are agreed. We have 
not hitherto bestowed a sufficient recognition upon 
the village system of India ; we have not properly 
encouraged the Punchayet. Not to have done so is 
a manifest, but in us not perhaps an unnatural, error. 
The village system is something so foreign to all our 
notions of polity, that it is not strange that we have 
neglected or misunderstood it. One can conceive 
how an European, especially an Englishman, looking 
on it at first sight, would regard it as a sort of 

* "I can recollect, and I do it with shame, the period when I 
thought myseK very much superior to those with whom my duty 
made me associate ; but as my knowledge of them and of myself 
improved, the distance between us gradually lessened. I have seen 
and heard much of our boasted advantages over them, but cannot 
think," &c. Instructions hy Major -General Sir John Malcolm to Officers 
acting under Us orders in Central India in 1821. 



298 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

rough-and-ready substitute for a proper central state 
organisation ; as a sort of private assumption of self- 
government by tlie little village community, brought 
about by the apathy or decrepitude of the central 
power. And one can further understand how, with- 
out such a misconception, a conquering race, con- 
scious and proud of its capacity to rule, might say, 
"We. can do without this." But not the less is the 
village system normal to India. Its veriest advan- 
tage is, that it enables the population to live and do 
well without centralisation. And this may be called 
an advantage to the Hindoos: not because centrali- 
sation, unless it be excessive, is an evil; but because, 
over such an immense area as India, centralisation is 
worse than inconvenient,^ — it is impossible. Already 
we have come to acknowledge the necessity, first 
of three, and subsequently of ^ve or six, different 
capitals. And even with these, and with all the 
growing advantages of railways completed, what im- 
mense distances will separate the greater part of the 
country d.istricts from their respective capitals! It 
must be borne in mind that the populations of India 
will always be in the main agricultural, and that to 
such it is always more inconvenient to have to travel 
than to any other. Moreover, long journeys in hot 
countries, even to natives, are unusually wearisome; 
and the Hindoos from long habit are prejudiced 
against them, and perhaps always wiU. be more or 
less. Every means, therefore, should be taken to 
provide for the wants of the community without 
centralisation. For this end there is nothing so 
essential as to maintain the village system, and to 
make it the base of as much as possible in the admi- 
nistration. And in the village system few things are 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 299 

more important than the Punchayet. Look to its con- 
struction; revive its courts; merge them into one, if 
that be well ; elevate the character of its assembKes, 
if you can; make permanent village judges, not lil^e 
the village Moonsiffs existing at present, independent 
of the '' collage" as an mstitution, but as a part of its 
municipal structure. Of this revival of the " tillage," 
so far as Punchayet is concerned, there is another 
way of stating the advantage. The Hindoos are an 
uncommonly litigious people ; worse, if possible, in this 
respect than the Welsh ! Notwithstanding all disas- 
ters and inconveniences in the shape of expense, delay, 
and loss of time that should be spent on tillage or in 
trade, and even in spite of their constitutional ob- 
jection to travel, they will fight, however distant the 
arena may be. It is e^ddent how the evils of this 
trait would be mitigated by the development of Pun- 
chayet. Many a dispute that now takes months of 
time, bags of rupees, and many miles of travel, to set- 
tle, not to speak of neglected crops, would be disposed 
of in a day within the village where it arose.* 

But if it be true that the " villao-e" has not met 
with sufficient recognition at the hands of the British 
Government in arranging the settlement of the judi- 
cature, it has fared still worse in the treatment of the 
land tenures for purposes of revenue. In Bengal and 
Madras, where the collection of the revenues was 
settled in the earlier days of our occupation, two 
arbitrary and unwholesome systems chiefly prevail. 
The province of Bengal, with most of its appanages, 

* I am aware that the district judges have power, with consent 
of the litigants, to refer suits to arbitration ; but this occasional 
Punchayet rather confirms the notions expressed above about the 
restoration of the " village" than rebuts the force of them. 



300 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

is the subject of the zeminclary system invented 
under the direction of Lord Cornwallis. Of this 
" permanent settlement," as it is called, little good 
is said, now that it is tested by a larger experience 
and by a higher motive. An ignorance, that was 
more natural than the haughty carelessness which 
accompanied it, of the customs, needs, and conditions 
of the Indian people, stereotyped this zemindary sys; 
tem upon the land. Two considerations, and two 
only, reigned supreme at Fort William at the time 
of its institution. These were, first, what is the most 
productive source of revenue that can be devised? 
and second, what is the easiest method of its collec- 
tion ? To the first of these questions the history of 
India supplied a ready answer in the land-tax. Nor 
has the future falsified the ]3ast. At this moment the 
land-tax of India produces four or five times as large 
a sum as the infamous monopoly of opium ; and were 
that blot upon the balance-sheet of India to be erased, 
there Avould remain no item that would bring to the 
exchequer a sum reaching to one-eighth of the great 
impost. But the reply to the problem of collection 
was neither so ready nor so simple. It was consi- 
dered, and it probably then was, impossible to intrust 
the revenue, at any stage of its manipulation, to na- 
tive hands. It would also have been impracticable 
to provide a staff of collectors of the requisite num- 
bers and knowledge of the people, to gather in the 
tax at first hand from a population of peasant pro- 
prietors. To diminish the number of the landed pro- 
prietors was at once to simplify the method of collec- 
tion and to reduce the labours attendant upon it 
within manageable limits. Accordingly, by an arbi- 
trary revolution, the province of Bengal was parcelled 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 301 

out into large estates, to enter upon the absolute 
ownership of which a class of men was found ready- 
made to hand. These were the Zemindars, the col- 
lectors of the land revenue under the Moguls ; a class 
of men in whom their office had become hereditary, 
but who had no proprietary interest whatever in the 
land, and no authority whatever over the true peasant 
or village proprietor, save such as arose out of the 
exercise of their functions.* This class, for the con- 
venience of the Government, but to the dismay of the 
true landowner, was elevated into a new territorial 
aristocracy, whose creation was subversive of what was 
best in the structure of Hindoo society, — the village 
and peasant ownership. It was hard thus to turn 
the simple owner of the soil into a tenant of the very 
man who was thus made the usurper of his property. 
Can it be wondered that the old tax-gatherer should, 
as the event has too often proved, make an extortion- 
ate landlord ; or the ancient landowner at once a surly 
tenant and a sluggish cultivator? A very well-in- 
formed and intelligent author writes on this subject: 

"It has subverted the rights of the real proprietor, and 
giyen them to speculators and contractors; it has a tendency to 
create numerous agents (all of whom must have their profits) 
between the landholder and the G-overnment; it is open to great 
abuse, from the power vested in the Zemindars, who too frequently 
expel the real proprietors by raising their taxes; it precludes the 
possibility of doing justice, owing to the rights of the cultiyator 

being ill defined; it overthrows the whole municipal 

system of the country by depriving the people of their natural 

* There were, however, very many cases where Zemindars had 
purchased the proprietary rights in the lands and villages over which 
their zemindary functions extended. These exceptions, joined to the 
fact that the village system had been now obliterated, contributed 
doubtless to the misconception under which the " permanent settle- 
ment" was determined. 



302 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

and hereditary village chiefs; and lastly, it is, as now established, 
an entirely novel invasion of the ancient usages and institutions 
of the people."* 

But little better in its results, though its method 
and motive both promised better, was the Eyot-war 
system of Sir Thomas Munro in Madras. Under it, 
and under all its modifications, which are many, the 
cultivator is made the proprietor; and he and the 
Government are brought face to face in the collection 
of the tax. He is at liberty either to sublet, or to 
transfer, or to surrender his holding. His tenantcy 
is perpetual, subject to a right of entry and forfeiture 
on the part of the Government, in case of his default 
in payment of the land-tax. Of this last the assess- 
ment is nominally fixed, and in money, and cannot 
be raised for improvements made by the ryot himself. 
It is said that the system works badly; and two or 
three reasons suggest themselves for its failure. The 
first of these is that which is involved in the very 
consideration which went so far to induce the estab- 
lishment of its exact contrary, the zemindary system. 
It renders necessary enormous civil establishments, 
and demands from the members composing the gene- 
ral staff of those establishments such an amount of 
local knowledge, such talents, such zeal, such tact, 
and one may add Vithout offence, such integrity, as 
cannot be universally expected. Another reason of 
failure is, that by refusing to recognise any distinc- 
tion of class between proprietors and cultivators, it 
did as much injustice at the time of its institution, in 
one way, as the infliction of Zemindars did in another. 
Again, from the fixity of the assessment, it would be 
ruin to a small holder in a bad year, if inexorably 

'"' Briggs on the Land-tax in India, part iii. chap. i. p, 370. 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 303 

levied; and so perforce it is made the subject of con- 
tinual remissions. So constant are these remissions, 
that I believe I am justified in saying that they vir- 
tually amount to an annual assessment. It is easy to 
see how such a state of things fails of success. A 
cultivator, sure of remission in years of actual misfor- 
tune, and pretty sure too that his own cunning, work- 
ing upon the facility or ignorance of the collector, 
will make the result of laziness look like that of ill- 
luck, has little or no incentive to energy. He becomes 
as bad a cultivator in his apathy as the Zemindar's 
ryot in his hopelessness, the only difference between 
them being that the one has reason to be better-tem- 
pered than the other. Lastly, this system is, as fully 
as its contrary, a subversion of the "village," so dear 
and so well suited to the people. 

In place of these two erroneous settlements, had 
the "village" been retained wherever it was found 
in perfect preservation, and reorganised or restored 
wherever it had become impaired or had been oblite- 
rated, all would have been well.* The "village" 
provided the very machinery that was wanted for the 
collection of the tax, in the manner most convenient 
to the Government and least burdensome to the peo- 
ple. The assessment would have been by villages, 
and the headman, as representative of the community, 
would have been responsible for the tax arising from 
the whole of the little territory. The ancient and 
mutual relations of proprietors and cultivators would 
have remained unchanged; we should not have had 

''' Much to Lord Dalhousie's credit, this was done to a very great 
extent in the Puniaub. In many parts of the north-western pro- 
vinces, consisting of hill country and waste lands, the village system 
would have been out of place, and simple grants of land to private 
individuals have very properly been made instead. 



304 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

now to contrast the cruelty of creating a new and 
tyrannous class of middlemen, with the folly of an 
attempt by governmental machinery to fix annually 
the assessment of every field on a continent; and 
lastly, we should not have contributed our efforts to 
the ill work of abolishing the ancient usages and 
institutions of what, with their retention, would un- 
doubtedly become one of the happiest of peoples. 

It is not mere sentiment, that would seek to fix 
upon the people of India, or to restore to them, an 
institution so suited to the conditions of a simple, 
widely-spread, and agricultural population. The 
'' village," as a social basis, may well, for want of a 
better term, be called patriarchal; and its rehabili- 
tation would be to restore to the Indians all that 
they probably value, and all that being really valua- 
ble has been lost to them in the various troubles and 
changes through which their populations have passed. 
It has been acknowledged, with much feeling and 
truth, by one of the most celebrated writers on India, 
that the village communities might well be taken as 
a model wherever mankind should be placed in con- 
ditions similar to those of the country people in India. 
Without claiming so much for them, but resting con- 
tent with the assurance that no other distribution 
would so well suit the people among whom it spon- 
taneously arose, one may well advocate its mainte- 
nance, and where possible, its restoration. It has 
been the waves of conquest alone that have sub- 
merged it ; and now that the ruinous tide has receded, 
it is the prerogative of a peace-bearing age and of a 
peace-giving government to clear and to restore.* 

-• For a very careful and thoughtful inquiry into the effects that 
conquest and war have had on the village system, the reader is referred 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 305 

It is difficult to conceive a work that might better 
occupy the attention of really beneficent rulers, or 
an employment that would be more to the taste of 
well - instructed and philanthropic public servants. 
The task would not be easy, doubtless, in districts 
where the ruin has been complete ; but it would 
always be grateful, and its pleasantness would never 
be interrupted or embittered by any fears for the 
consequences of its completion. These would as- 
suredly be innocuous ; and for the difficulties, they 
are only incidental to the magnitude of the task, and 
are not essential to its design. That England should 
be the restorer of the village system would be an 
unusual honour to her; for (except by her ryot-war 
and zemindary theory) she has had no hand in its 
destruction. It might be said of her, so long as she 
did nothing but repair her OAvn misdoings, that she 
was doing no more than humanity had a right to 
demand; but here she would be plainly stepping 
beyond that limit to do something that history would 
have an obligation to admire. 

An incidental reference to one method of raismg 
a revenue in India suggests a more direct mention of 
another. Few points in our administration have been 
made the subject of more righteous attack than the 
government purchases and sales of opium ; and 
scarcely ever has an indefensible position been at 
once left more disingenuously unvindicated and more 
doggedly maintained. No minister has ever ventured, 



to Wilks' History of Southern India. The author thinks, with much 
probability, that the preservation of the system is in an inverse ratio 
to the extent and completeness of the Mogul conquests. 



SOG ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

SO far as I know, to apologise from a moral stand- 
point for the enconragement which is officially given 
to this pernicious article of commerce. That its mo- 
nopoly is lucrative, and that its proceeds fill an abyss 
in the exchequer of India, is all that has ever been 
said in its favour. There is something cynical in the 
indifference which is persistently exhibited by all 
persons interested in the preservation of the traffic to 
animadversions on its enormity. It is as though 
they considered it unnecessary, when brought to the 
bar of public opinion in England, to do more than 
tell their contemporaries that four millions of money 
would be the cost of a recognition of a manifest public 
duty, to make sure of the maintenance of its correla- 
tive abuse. They laugh at the idea of society heark- 
ening to a moralist after a financier. And yet it is ab- 
solutely impossible for an honest man to spend even 
a few hours in any public library, where he can gain 
access to the few facts that will enable him to judge 
of this matter, without confessing that the traffic of 
the English government in opium is different in kind 
as well as in degree from the general crowd of im- 
moralities that are tolerated for their expediency. 
It has, indeed, but one parallel, — the slave-trade be- 
tween Africa and America. The one is no more a 
trade in human life than the other. The nature and 
consequences of both are equally tremendous, and 
to those who conduct them are equally well known. 
Indeed, if we could trust ourselves for one moment 
to allow weight to its collateral results in mitigation 
of its condemnation, we might pronounce the Bra- 
zilian slave-trade to be the less national crime of the 
two. For the products of slave labour are commodi- 
ties which are comforts and blessings to the civiHsed 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 307 

populations of the world; and slave labour is em- 
ployed in countries of which our present experience 
does not permit us to say with certainty that they 
would be otherwise provided mth an adequate agri- 
culture. But the opium trade has no results save 
in the demoralisation and rum of millions of civilised 
men. There is no room either for casuistry or scep- 
ticism ; there is no doubt of the evil done, and none 
of the gross immorality that profits by its perpetua- 
tion. Until the date of the treaty of Tien-tsin, the 
Chinese authorities nobly persisted, in spite of threats, 
cajollery, and temptation, to admit the cursed drug 
into their ports. A late emperor of China, in reply 
to repeated requests from the British that he would 
legalise its import, used words the nobility of which 
should have shamed his European tempters. "I can- 
not prevent," he said, " the introduction of the flow- 
ing poison; gain-seeking and corrupt men Avill, for 
profit and sensuality, defeat bij wishes ; but nothing 
will induce me to derive a revenue from the vice 
and misery of my people."* In the end, as is well 
known, the cannon of England subdued the prudery 
of the Chinese government, and a sanction to the 
import of this bane of the vastest population on the 
face of the globe, Avas sealed in the agreement of 
Shanghai, appended to the treaty of Tien-tsin. But 
not the less for this, its forcible legitimation, is the 
yearly mflux of opium from India to China a dis- 
grace to the Government of the Queen. iS^ot the 
less is it disheartening to read, in grave reports 
from the poppy-growing districts of Northern India, 

* See Memorial to the Eight Honourable the Earl of Clarendon, 
&c., Parliamentary Papers, 1857, xliii. 79 ; and also Reply of Chinese 
Commissioners to Sir H. Pottinger, in the same volnine, p. 11. 



308 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

regrets and apologies from commissioners and collec- 
tors that a decline in its cultivation is noticeable, 
and that cereals are taking its place over the land, 
v/ith suggestions that a further encouragement is 
necessary to induce the ryots to plant! We may 
well ask if all means of replenishing the Indian 
treasury are exhausted, and whether the loss of 
4,000,000/., which a resolution to surrender this 
traffic would cause, cannot be successfully regathered 
over the whole area of Indian taxation? Are we to 
suppose that every other branch of the revenue is sta- 
tionary for ever; that no more waste land will come 
within the operation of the land-tax ; that the duties 
on salt, or spirits, tobacco, or piece goods, will never 
increase ; or that the moneyed classes of India will 
never be made permanently amenable to an income- 
tax? Is it absolutely impossible, too, to reduce an 
annual expenditure of 35,000,000/. for a while, so 
as to partially meet the reduction in income ? Better 
a railway postponed, a geological survey intermitted, 
or other public works — such, for instance, as the ex- 
penditure of 20,000/. upon the erection of a Christian 
church in a Hindoo country, to gratify the imperial 
race with the mere architectural splendour of reli- 
gion — teniporarily countermanded, than that any 
delay should be in the repudiation of a national 
shame. Not even the few casuists who defend the 
opium trade ever venture to propound its perpetuity. 
They never say more than that it must follow the 
laws of political economy, — the laws, in fact, of that 
science which always treats men as acting, and makes 
them to act too, from the lowest motive. But what 
in their mouths does such a declaration mean more 
than that the extinction of the trade must be left to 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 309 

the moral strength of the Chinese populations? In 
other words, that we are to profit by their weakness 
and degradation so long as these may last; and that, 
so far as the supply of the baleful materials for both 
can effect it, we shall take care that the day of re- 
generation shall be indefinitely postponed. 

Any attempt to re\iew the relations between 
Great Britain and India would be incomplete with- 
out some mention of their religions. There are re- 
ligious as well as secular politics, especially when 
the religion of the conquerors has been brought face 
to face with that of the conquered. It is to be 
hoped that the dream of an aggressive and direct 
propagandism, sanctioned and assisted by the state, 
is over even among the enthusiasts of Exeter Hall. 
It is also to be hoped that one of the many theories 
of the causes and origin of the great mutiny will 
deter residents in India from offensive and ill-judged 
missionary efforts. Hindooism is no trumpery and 
barbaric superstition, spread over a small area, and 
swaying a contemptible race. On the contrary, it 
is a product of the human mind, ancient, and deeply 
rooted and widely spread, and such as cannot be 
eradicated or swept off in a day or a generation; 
at least not by any means either worthy oT the spirit 
or within the resources of this age. The sudden 
and forcible conversion of races was an art that prob- 
ably culminated in the hands of the followers of the 
Prophet. And yet, though there was a Mussulman 
empire of India for more than four hundred years, 
at its dissolution the true believers only numbered 
about one-tenth of the total population of the Penin- 
sula. What the Mohammedan conquerors of India 
found it either impossible or improper to effect by 



310 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

the political method may well be thought either the 
one or the other by us, who are bound to be both 
more moral and more cautious than thev. The 
Government can only hope to avoid the most fatal 
consequences, as well to its own power as to the 
Hindoo race itself, by a total abstinence from any 
thing like support or countenance to religious pro- 
pagandism. That any thing can be more politically 
suicidal than the opposite course, we may assure our- 
selves by the example of the Portuguese. Of them 
it is well said by Sir John Malcolm, that " they 
hastened their downfall in India by that bigoted 
spirit with which they endeavoured to introduce 
their religion." Their Government made it its busi- 
ness to surroimd its settlements and towns with the 
native Christians, v/ho were the products of its pro- 
selytising efforts. They thus, as it were, threw up 
between themselves and the Hindoos and Mohamme- 
dans at large a stockade of heretics, effecting by a 
masterly fatuousness an isolation which could only 
be their ruin. More than this, they forgot what too 
many of us have been apt to forget, that one ancient 
and highly civilised and therefore haughty race is 
as much attached to its religious faith as another. 
Contempt, which has its source in religion, is the 
worst of all insolence and the most dangerous. 
" What sanction," asks the Hindoo, " has this man for 
his faith other than I have for mine, that he should 
laugh at me?" But the personal indignation thus 
aroused is not nearly so perilous as the universal 
panic which propaganclism is sure, sooner or later, 
to evoke. We do not know thoroughly yet how far 
the ludicrous idea of the "greased cartridge" had 
its true side ; how far it did or did not symbolise a 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 311 

dread among the Sepoys that their rehgioii was the 
subject of attack. If the source of the mutiny be to 
.be traced to the ahirm of the native princes, what 
more likely than that they should have used the re- 
ligious fanaticism of the Sepoys as a secondary cause ? 
And if they did, how dreadful was the fire they 
kindled, and how cautious we should be of putting 
a new spark to its materials ! 

Sir John Malcolm is distinctly of opinion that the 
mutiny and massacre at Yellore were occasioned in a 
great measure by the success of certain discontented 
and designing natives in persuading the soldiers that 
Government entertained a design of proscribing their 
religion. " The grounds," he says, " on which these 
agitators founded their persuasion were slight and. 
fallacious." ISTo doubt; but they answered the pur- 
pose. Sir George Barlow and his Council were of the 
same opinion; and they took care to embody their 
conviction in a despatch to the Secret Committee. 
" We are satisfied," ran this document, " that a per- 
suasion — a most erroneous one, indeed, but a firm 
and sincere persuasion — in the breasts of a great 
proportion of the Sepoys who were thus betrayed 
into the execution of the massacre at Yellore, and of 
those who subsequently manifested a spirit of insub- 
ordination, that a design existed on the part of the 
British Government to operate a general conversion. 
of the inhabitants of India to Christianity, was one 
of the efiicient causes of that horrible disaster." Sir 
John Malcolm, after quoting this despatch, goes on 
to observe that this opinion of the supreme Govern- 
ment was in concurrence with all those whose public 
duty obliged them to investigate the causes of that 
catastrophe. Twice, therefore, in the brief history of 



312 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

British India has it appeared that the religious fears 
of the native soldiery have been directed to bring 
about an epoch of horror. Let all those who would 
have the chief cause to dread a third take care to 
place beyond the chances of employ so terrible an 
engine. Let there be no act that the malevolent 
may misrepresent or the ignorant misconstrue. Pre- 
vious to the last outbreak there had been much that 
was injudicious in the Christian zeal of many public 
servants ; and among those which could be specified 
in this matter are names which no English critic will 
now mention to illustrate any thing but honour. It 
is possible, though no doubt it would be difficult, so 
utterly to win the confidence, even of the most igno- 
rant, that the repetition of intrigue based upon terror 
would be impossible. It is not, therefore, only the 
Government, but its servants, civil and military, and 
every man and woman connected with it or them even 
in the remotest degree, who ought to abstain from 
every act capable of being mistaken for missionary 
eiFort. Any chaplain holding a definite appointment, 
under Government or otherwise, should only convert 
a native under pain of immediate dismissal. No 
missionary work ought to be permitted to be in con- 
nection, direct or indirect, with the official establish- 
ment of the Church of England in India. And even 
as to private missions, the only connection which the 
Government ought to have with them is to moderate 
them. Lord Minto, in allusion to a memorial re- 
ceived from certain missionaries, observed, "We have 
great satisfaction in acknowledging the temperate and 
respectful spirit of that memorial, and in expressing 
our active conviction of the correctness of the state- 
ment which it contains relative to the motives and 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 313 

objects and zeal of the missionaries for the propaga- 
tion of the sacred doctrines of Christianity ; and our 
duty as the guardians of the public welfare, and even 
a conscientious sohcitude for the diffusion of the bless- 
ings of Christianity, merely require us to restrain the 
effects of that commendable zeal within those limits 
the transgression of which would, in our decided 
judgment, expose to hazard the public safety and 
tranquillity, without promoting its intended object, 
and would be incompatible with a just adherence to 
the obligations of political interest and public faith." 

If all this was true and ioiportant in Lord Minto's 
day, its truth is ten times more important now. So 
long as our power was subordinate in India, and 
even whilst our ascendency was modified by the 
existence of important native Powers, the efforts of 
missionaries would provoke, and did provoke, a con- 
siderable amount of jealous attention and remark. 
But now that we are supreme, without a rival, almost 
without contemporaries, the nervousness that waits 
on every act of ours, not merely as a government, 
but as a dominating race, becomes morbid as well 
as universal. It is those who are conscious of no 
refuse that are ever on the look-out for clano-er : and 
an anxiety that has become chronic needs very little 
at any time to transform it into an acute and danger- 
ous alarm. 

It may be asked why I, who appear to value so 
little our imperial hold upon India that I am williag 
to see it dwiudle away to a mere quasi-feudal suze- 
rainty with a vanishing point still beyond, should 
survey this question from a purely j^olitical stand- 
point. The answer to such an objection is twofold. 
First, because before philosophic minds it is un- 



314 EIsTGLAND AND INDIA. 

necessary to argue a proposition that by such would 
be conceded in advance; and before others it would 
be useless to lay it in a philosophic light. Secondly, 
because it is in its political aspect, after all, that the 
matter is most important. Otherwise it might be 
of advantage to show that the operation of the mis- 
sionaries in India has been disastrous in proportion 
to its activity. They have been for the most part 
rash and ignorant men ; and the consequences of their 
rashness and ignorance have been unfortunately to be 
measured exactly by the amount of the enthusiasm 
which set them into action. They have had but the 
scantiest knowledge, if any at all, of the structure 
of Hindoo society. At all events, it has been just 
those parts of the S3^stem of which some knowledge 
was most important that the gloom of their ignorance 
has most deeply shrouded. They have simply gone 
about scattering, without method or caution, a few 
crude doctrines of a strange religion, and one avow- 
edly destructive, among the members of a society 
held, and only held together by the very religion they 
were seeking to subvert. Their dream was probably 
the immediate conversion of the continent ; and yet 
the consequences of conversion to a single ryot might 
have given them a faint notion of the collapse and 
anarchy that would have supervened upon the realisa- 
tion of their broader vision. Have they been all along 
prepared to reconstruct what they have been thus 
fatuously eager to destroy? No one can pretend to 
prophes}^ what the religious future of India will be ; 
it is sufficient to recognise the fact that any such ac- 
tion upon it as we have been discussing could only 
end, if sufficiently extended, in a wide- spread social 
catastrophe. But such action, in the improved tem- 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 315 

per and knowledge of the West, is liappilj^ impossible ; 
and in the absence of such it is perhaps, as I said 
before, most important to present the question in its 
political aspect. The maintenance of the English 
power in India is essential until the regeneration of 
Indian society is complete. The machinery and ad- 
ministration of the Eno;lish Government is the scaf- 
foldino; mthin which the edifice must rise, and which 
must only be withdrawn pole by pole as the various 
parts are concluded. It is matter, therefore, of the 
deepest concern that our power should be stable so 
long as it lasts ; and m its stability no one element 
will operate so largely as the confidence of the native 
population in matters afiecting their religion. A simi- 
lar confidence of the native princes, in respect of their 
dominions and privileges, is no doubt another and 
almost equally important element; but they cannot 
attack us except with the assistance of the masses; 
and with these they will find no occasion against us 
except in the matter of their Gods. 

We have now reached that point when we may 
consider the inauTOration of what will be the o-reatest 
and last change of all in the course of English policy 
in India. It is the reversal of those foolish annexa- 
tions about which so much has already been said. 
There are many persons who will thinl?: it more diffi- 
cult to do this than to revolutionise the civil ser-\T.ce, 
the judicature, or even the army, because the me- 
thod of the revolution is not quite so palpable. To 
many persons it will seem simple to throw open to an 
ascertained width the portals of a special competition, 
who Villi still ask how it would be possible to com- 
mence the restoration of an abrogated monarchy. 
They would say that there is nothing retrograde in 



316 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

admitting natives into the very highest ranks of the 
civil service, the judicature, or the army; that the 
State has never pledged itself to their exclusion; that 
to proclaim their eligibility is no new principle ; and 
that to make it practical involves no perilous or un- 
dignified action, no confession of error or weakness, 
and lastly, what to such minds is always most impor- 
tant, no inconsistent reversal of state policy. But, 
they would urge, how is it possible to restore the 
Eajah of Mysore to the very smallest exercise of his 
sovereign power, when we have so peremptorily and 
so often denied the possibility of any such measure ? 
Or how could we bring again from his exile the heir 
of Oude or of the Punjaub, when we have with so 
much of imperial solemnity proclaimed the extinction 
of his dynasty ? How to begin such changes as these ? 
With what face and in what fashion? It may not 
look easy at first sight; but difficulties are wont to 
lessen while they are approached, and to disappear 
when they are attacked. In the first place, the annex- 
ation policy is, as I have said elsewhere, essentially 
modern, and is one into which the nation has been 
led like a blindfolded horse, after having repudiated 
visible conquest. To reverse it would be, therefore, 
only to recognise the error of a path into which our 
wandering had been not early but late, not original 
but subsequent, not deliberate but unconscious, nor 
even only unconscious but unwilling. How many of 
our statesmen of all types, from Tory to Radical, have 
protested against all these annexations, first and last? 
Of how many of such measures would it be untrue to 
say that they were first foisted by a clique in India 
upon a facile or uninformed ministry at home, and by 
that ministry, sometimes from love of office and some- 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 317 

times from mere cliivalry, defended and forced upon 
Parliament, and through Parliament forced upon the 
country ? Which of them has not really been rather 
the result of a submission than of an exertion of the 
national will? They were never the policy of our 
earlier and greater administrators; they were the in- 
vention of a later and less worthy type. The great 
men of old, sometimes from a far-seeing policy, some- 
thnes too from a love of justice which not even the 
contamination of empire could pollute, were for ever 
warning themselves and each other of the day when 
this country would abandon herself to an unrestrained 
acquisitiveness. Sir John Malcolm, from whom it is 
always a pleasure to quote, says : 

" It is the ayowed, and I am satisfied the true policy of tlie 
British state, while it maintains the general peace of the country, 
to keep not only in the enjoyment of their high rank, but in the 
active exercise of their sovereign functions, the diJBPerent princes 
and chiefs who are virtually or declaredly dependent on its pro- 
tection. The principal object (setting aside the obligations of 
faith) is to keep at a distance that crisis to which, in spite of our 
efforts, we are gradually approaching, of having the whole of 
India subject to our direct rule." 

Among all those great men who have illustrated the 
English name in India, no more complete politician 
has arisen than Sir John Malcolm ; and it may well 
be added, few juster men. In the extract just cited 
he distinctly affirms the policy, and only sets apart 
the obligations of faith, in a way which shows how 
little he has forgotten, and how much he values 
them. 

And the Duke of Wellington — speaking, it is true, 
rather as a strategist than as a morahst or a states- 
man, but thereby from an independent and corrobo- 
rative point of view — urges the maintenance of our 



318 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

treaties with Oucle in the north, and with Mysore m 
the south. He calls the subsidiary treaty with the 
latter an arrangement, and its Hindoo monarchy a 
government, "calculated to afford the most substan- 
tial assistance to Great Britain m all her difficulties." 
And so of the treatj^ with Oude he says, "It is an 
arrangement of the affairs of that country calculated 
to increase the strength of the British Government 
on its Xorth -Western frontier, which was one of its 
weak points." And why so calculated? Because to 
a soldier's eye it was well to interpose a strong and 
friendly state between ourselves and the turbulent 
regions of the North- West. Would the Duke of Wel- 
lington have advocated the extinction of that friendly 
state the moment that the most palpable uses of its 
alliance were over? 

But if there be a name which is remembered with 
more high respect than others, both for msdom and 
for integrity, it is that of Lord Metcalfe. Let us 
put before ourselves two or three expressions of his 
opinion on this subject. In one place he says : 

" With respect to alliances with petty states, I shall observe 
tha,t, in my opinion, they might be made highly adyantageous. 
Those states in Hindostan under our protection would form an 

excellent frontier Such a fr^ontier .... would be 

a very great strength to us. I do not see the same inconvenience 
which you do of interference in their broils; I am more inclined 
to believe that the effect of our established interference would be 
to put an end to all their broils, and to diffuse universal tran- 
quillity; and if this system is not destroyed, I look forward in 
sanguine hopes to this blessed end (universal tranquillity), the 
inestimable gift of Great Britain to India, and the proudest 
monument of our glory."* 

Surely the abolition of the native states, our rela- 

^ Letter to Mr. Sherer, September 1805. 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 319 

tions with which he hopes mil be perpetual, would 
not have been the method for arriving at universal 
tranquillity, with which Metcalfe would have sympa- 
thised. His ideal was plainly not that peace which 
has been called the synonym for solitude. And in 
another place he speaks of the petty states "who 
look up to us for protection, and are therefore well- 
disposed to us;" and adds, "from those we have 
nothmg to apprehend : those it is our interest 
to uphold and protect ;" and further on he says : 
"Though it is not indispensably necessary for our 
vital interests that we should support them, yet it 
is a just and proper object of a wise and liberal 
pohcy."* 

How agreeably words and opinions like these con- 
trast themselves with such a declaration as that of 
Lord Dalhousie, quoted in the earlier pages of this 
Essay, and commencing with the words, " I cannot 
conceive it possible for any one to dispute the policy 
oftakmg advantage of any just opportunity for con- 
solidating the territories that already belong to us, 
by takmg possession of states which may lapse in the 
midst of them ; thus getting rid of those petty mter- 
vening principalities !" 

I do not wish to be accused of misinterpreting 
Lord Metcalfe. Pie certainly did, at the same time 
that he wrote what I have quoted, advocate the ex- 
.tension of British territory. He thought it at that 
time too small for the safe exercise of our imperial 
power, which was dear to Metcalfe. It must be re- 
membered too that those were the days when Scindia 
was in all his dangerous prominence, when the Mah- 
rattas were still unhumbled, and the Pindarees in 

* Vide " Scheme for a General Settlement of Central India." 



320 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

existence. These turbulent and predatory powers 
it was undoubtedly liis desire that England, for the 
good of India, should, as he said openly, "either 
annihilate, or reduce to a state of weakness, subjec- 
tion, or dependence." For this purpose a certain 
growth and consolidation of the Company as a terri- 
torial power he considered indispensable. But he 
had fixed in his own mind a point beyond which 
that growth ought not to stretch. His advice was to 
go on "growing in size and increasing in strength as 
we proceed, until we can with safety determine to 
confine ourselves within fixed limits and abjure all 
further conquests." We were to go on only till 
" safety" was achieved, and even to that point only 
" consistently with justice and policy, moderation to 
our enemies, and due attention to our allies." 

Would Metcalfe for safety's sake have deposed 
the Eajah of Mysore; from a consistence with justice 
and policy have refused to recognise the Nawaub of 
the Carnatic; from due attention to our allies have 
annexed Oude; or by way of moderation to an enemy 
have confiscated first the dominions and subsequently 
the rupees of the Kajah of Coorg? 

But Lord Metcalfe not only states the principle 
of non-annexation, he supplies us with an example 
of the method. His residence at Hyderabad was 
a type of what our conduct ought to be in Native 
Kingdoms. We found the governments of all those 
with which we were brought into contact weak, and 
their aifairs in disorder. The inevitable consequences 
of our first connection with them were to make mat- 
ters worse. Our plain duty was therefore, and it is 
still unfulfilled, to repair. This Metcalfe conceived 
to be his duty, and he did it. Any body who will 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 321 

be at the trouble to read his Memoranda for Com- 
missioners to the Eajah Chmidoo Lall will find that 
they go to the root of the evils of the country. They 
are a perfect synopsis of wrongs to be done away 
and remedies to be applied ; in other words, a detailed 
statement of the necessity and a detailed scheme 
for reform. They are too lengthy, of course, for 
quotation here; but there is a certain letter of his, 
written after a tour of inspection through the Xizam's 
country, which shows what, after mature deliberation, 
his scheme was. 

" I therefore propose," he writes, " with the assent of the 
Nizam's goYemment, to employ the assistants of the Eesidency 
and some of the best qualified of the [N'izam's officers in different 
divisions of the Nizam's territory, for the purpose of checking 
oppression and violation of faith on the part of the officers of the 
Government, securing adherence to settlements, taking cognisance 
of crimes, and looking after the police, especially on the frontiers, 
on which point I receive continual complaints from the neigh- 
bom'ing governments. These officers {i e. assistants of the Eesi- 
dency) should take no part in the collection of the revenues nor 
in the general administration of the country. Neither should 
the forms of the Nizam's government be invaded. The officers 
should not have any peculiar official designation founded on their 
duties, lest it should be considered as a partial introduction of 
our rule ; and if at any time, from good schooling or rare good- 
ness, there should be reasonable ground of hope that a district 
could be managed safely without such a check, I should think it 
a duty to withdraw the office from that district. « * * * It 
appears to me to be the only way of preserving the Nizam's 
government in all its parts entire, with the addition of the cheek 
of European integrity, which can be at any time removed without 
damaging any other part of the edifice, if at any time it can be 
dispensed with."* 

It would be impossible to collate a clearer or, 
considering its authorship, a more valuable corrobo- 

® Letter to Mr. Swinton, June 1821. 

Y 



322 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

ration of the theory which I have propounded. Hy- 
derabad still survives, and it ought to be made a 
precedent and a model. Travancore too is a native 
state in a position analogous to that of the Nizam's 
kingdom. They both afford admirable specimens of 
the transitional state through which native princi- 
palities and native princes might be made to pass. 
Why can we not commence the revolution at once, 
by placing the titular Nawaub of the Carnatic and 
the Rajah of Mysore in the same position, mutatis 
mutandis^ as the Nizam or the Eajah of Travancore? 
Why not also raise up a new Yizier of Oude, with 
something like the same amount of actual sove- 
reignty? These would make three important ex- 
amples of Lord Metcalfe's principles. It would be 
hard indeed to anticipate failure in the face of all 
that the yearly reports from Hyderabad and Travan- 
core tell us of success and satisfaction. We should 
then have five states in which the political and social 
transitions and reconstructions which I have advo- 
cated throughout might be brought into full work. 
They would be types of the new revolution, and 
would at once sanction and facilitate its universahty. 
It would not be necessary pedantically to restore 
every petty state of which the last one hundred years 
have seen the abolition. No inhabitant of a conti- 
nent, no citizen of a state system, in which the duke- 
doms of Germany have yet to be expunged, would 
ever advocate that. It is the peoples, not the princes 
of India who are the clients of revolution. The 
necessity is simply so to parcel out the soil of India 
that stable and natural governments may exist over 
the whole of it, and that there may be no room for 
'' occupancy," when the day of our retirement shall 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 323 

dawn. Nor is there any reason for hurry. Once 
proclaim and inaugurate the new era, and leisure to 
perfect it will be abundantly conceded from all sides. 
Circumstances will, doubtless, be developed during 
the course of our unproved administration which 
will point to what is to be the political distribution, 
wherever it is at present unarranged, of the peoples 
of India. It is possible that as time rolls on, we 
may raise the Punjaub mto a nation, and find a head 
for it ; and that we may parcel out Central India, if 
we do not reconstruct it under the Nagpore state, 
among the various native kingdoms that surround it. 
We are not without a precedent in the art of king- 
making, or the Hindoo Eajah of Mysore would not 
now be a suppliant for our justice. And as for the 
redistribution and bestowal of territory that has thus 
lost its form as a state, and whose inhabitants may 
have forgotten their existence as a nation, we may 
not find it impossible to apply that principle of an- 
nexation which we have so often used for conveni- 
ence and self-aggrandisement, as an instrument of 
justice and the general good, and to put a coping- 
stone here and there upon the edifice of the liberties 
of the Continent. 

I have thus endeavoured to present in an intelli- 
gible connection some of the principal elFects of the 
EngHsh occupation upon the continent of India. The 
natural limits of an Essay have so girt about the nar- 
rative that much has been omitted, and still more re- 
legated to the inconvenient obscurity of collateral or 
indirect allusion. But I hope that enough has been 
adduced to show how the extension of their terri- 
tories by the East India Company was made, uncon- 
sciously to some extent, but in the main by design, and 



324 ENGLAND AND INDIA. 

wherever it was pressed, subversive of the Hindoo so- 
ciety. Enough to make it clear, that whatever in the 
shape of executive or administrative function they did 
not absorb they swept out of their way; and what- 
ever of the actual fabric of the system they did not 
transform by appropriation they demolished, paralysed, 
or ignored. Enough to illustrate the process by which 
thrones were cast down, landmarks of nations altered 
or removed, reigning families exiled and dishonoured, 
and no ofiice of government intrusted to the native 
races mvolving a higher destiny than to keep a regis- 
ter or to sweep a bureau. Enough to show how the 
judicature was monopolised ; the sources and founda- 
tions of justice changed; and that vast uniform social 
basis, on which the judicial executive and fiscal 
structures had all rested, was treated as a trumpery 
piece of rustic patchwork, which might be perchance 
a modern makeshift, perchance an obsolete relic, but 
which in either case it was a waste of time to study, 
and a ridicule to recognise or preserve. I have hinted 
rather than expressed how an unconsidered conflict 
of religions was at one time risked ; and how, by the 
abrogation and entanglement of land-tenures, first in 
one direction and then in another, ancient sentiments, 
rights, privileges, and distinctions, were outraged 
and confused. I have then attempted, mthout ven- 
turing upon details which v^ere at once beyond my 
opportunities of information and the scope of this 
Essay, to indicate some of the paths which would re- 
conduct us in the government of India towards the 
several points of departure from which the courses 
of our error have run. Nor only so: I have ven- 
tured to express a conviction, over which I have 
Imgered with a pleasant hope, that we may do more 



ENGLAND AND INDIA. 325 

than retrace our own steps, more than reconstruct 
what we ourselves have destroyed. It is to be hoped 
that as we are the latest, so we are the last of the 
conquerors of India. Let us be then the earliest 
and the only ones to discover the true meaning of 
her history and our own. As a generation we are 
only so far responsible for the evils of the past as we 
add our contributions to them for the contemplation, 
the difficulty, the peril, or the temptation of pos- 
terity. Evil, like good, grows in prolongation; in 
the moral as in the material world there is no halt- 
ing, no finality. If we now reject the duty of 
restoration presented to us, we shall bequeath one 
of three misfortunes to our children — either a cata- 
strophe, whose proportions we shall have made more 
gigantic; the incumbrance of a task which we shall 
have made more overwhelming ; a heritage of guilt 
which we shall have enlarged. For one of three ends 
must come. Either India, grown in wealth, yearn- 
ing with memories, and fretting with desires, will 
rise and rend her enslavers; or the generation that 
shall come after us, seeing and grappling with the 
duty and the task which we shall have refused to ac- 
knowledge or to undertake, will find both aggravated 
alike in kind and in proportions ; or else if, contrary 
to the best hopes and to the soundest expectations, 
we bequeath at once a want of conscience and a 
material force sufficient for one age after us to pro- 
long our dominion, we shall have contributed not 
advancement, but retrogression, to the course of 
humanity, progeniem vitiosiorem vitio parentum as an 
impediment to the history of the world. 

E. H. PEMBER. 



No. V. 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 



BY 



JOHN HENKY BRIDaES. 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 



I. 

HISTOEICAL VIEW OP THE RELATIONS OF EITaLAND WITH CHINA. 

In the month of June 1839, the Chinese Commis- 
sioner Lin, having collected from the various smug- 
gling ships in the Canton waters 20,291 chests of 
opium, threw it into large pits dug for the purpose, 
poured lime and oil upon it, and let the fluid com- 
pound be carried away by the next high tide. Over- 
seers were stationed to prevent the workmen or vil- 
lagers from purloining the opium, and one man was 
summarily executed for attempting to carry away a 
small quantity; and no doubt remained in the mind 
of the persons who visited the place, and examined 
every part of the operation, that the entire quantity 
was completely destroyed: "A solitary instance in 
the history of the world of a pagan monarch prefer- 
ring to destroy what would injure his subjects, rather 
than to fill his own pockets vnth its sale."* 

* TJie Opium Traffic : a letter to Captain Elliott by Mr. King, a 
merchant at Canton, who himself witnessed the destruction of the 
opimn. 



330 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

This event was the turning-point of English rela- 
tions with China. It was followed by a disgraceful 
war, concluded in 1842 by the treaty of Nankin, 
which remained for fifteen years the basis of our in- 
tercourse. To it may be traced more or less directly 
the frightful anarchy which China now suffers. To 
judge rightly of the present or future policy of Eng- 
land with regard to China, it is essential to bear in 
mind the circumstances attending and preceding the 
'' Opium War" of 1839-1842. 

Up to 1834 the commercial contact of England 
and indeed of other European Powers with China had 
been very limited. The imperial policy of strict limi- 
tation to a single port, Macao, had been consistently 
and successfully followed. The embassy of Lord 
Macartney in 1798, of Lord Amherst in 1816, though 
courteously received, had been as courteously dis- 
missed, after a few months' residence, with their 
commercial objects unattained. 

What was the motive of this policy? Was it 
founded in the narrow ignorance of all rational prin- 
ciples of polity; in the blind prejudices against all 
external civilisation; in the selfish dread of injuring 
vested interests, to which it is generally attributed, 
and to which protective tariffs in Western countries 
have been partly due ? Without claiming for the 
Chinese immunity from the political fallacies of more 
advanced nations, it is easy to point out three very 
obvious grounds which must have weighed with all 
prudent Chinese statesmen in maintaining their ex- 
clusive policy. 

In the first place, all the intercourse that they had 
had for two centuries with European merchants was 
of so unpromising a kind as to impress them most 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 331 

unfavourably mth tlie moral and social consequence 
of unlimited communication.* The second reason 
was the obvious danger to the social system of the 
country, if Western missionaries were to be allowed 
to disseminate their views without restraint. Of this 
danger they had had full experience. The emperors 
of the Tartar d}Tiasty had indeed welcomed the emi- 
nent men of science who were sent to them b}^ the 
Propaganda; but it was their science, not their reli- 
gion, which they welcomed. Between the heads of 
the Jesuit mission and the imperial court it was a 
well-understood bargain of profit and loss. So much 
protection to their co-religionists was to be given 
on the one side, so much trigonometrical and astro- 
nomical information on the other. But, with all 
the precautions that were taken, the revolutionising 
effects of Western rehgion were at last felt to be too 
dangerous for any compensation. The wise and broad 
views of the Jesuits, who had permitted the worship 
of Heaven, the worship of Confucius, and the wor- 
ship of the dead, as pardonable, nay, as salutary, 
appendages to Christian doctrine, were counteracted 
by the narrow intolerance of the Dominicans who 
succeeded them, men who, like our own Protestant 
missionaries, would admit of no such compromise; 
and it was then felt by the governing classes of the 
empire that the fundamental! institutions of their 
pohty were being sapped, and that no terms could 
any longer be kept with a religion which, unlike the 
other creeds of the empire, could tolerate no rival. 

* See the extracts from the Memorial of Sir R. Alcock, quoted in 
the note at the end of this Essay. 

t " The principal subject of reproach from a pagan of China to a 
Christian is, • that they neglect their forefathers.' " Qta^unton's Emhassi/ 
of Lord Macartney^ vol. ii. p. 350. 



332 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

But there was a third reason for the policy of ex- 
clusion, of more immediate and immment urgency ; 
the formidable extension of British power in India. 
In our gross ignorance of the policy of Eastern courts, 
we often attribute to them a degree of blindness as 
to passing events which would border upon idiocy; 
but it is certain that every step of Western aggression 
in any kingdom of the East, from Burmah to Japan, 
is well marked and keenly felt by all the rest. One 
instance will suffice. When Lord Macartney was in 
Pekin in 1798, all for a time went smoothly. Nothing 
could be more hospitable than his reception; and it 
seemed likely that, to some extent, his mission would 
be successful in removing restrictions upon trade. 
Suddenly the current turned against him. The party 
at court who had from the first opposed him became 
paramount, his warmest supporters were silenced or 
withdrew their support, and all his hopes vanished. 
It was not till long after that he discovered the rea- 
son of this change : it was that a report had reached 
Pekin that British troops were about to invade Ne- 
paul, the conquest of which would have made the 
two empires contermuious.* 

Fmally, if to these reasons we add the fact that, 
from its immense range of climate and varied fertility 
of soil, the Chinese empire is so far sufficient to itself 
for all the necessaries and for very many of the luxu- 
ries of life, that to this day, after twenty years of 
almost open trade, the main staple of our imports 
still continues to be what it was from the first, a poi- 
sonous drug ; and if we remember that at no period 
of her history has the " wealth of nations " been 
regarded by Chinese thinkers or statesmen as the 

* Staunton's Embassy, vol. ii. p. 50. 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 333 

supreme object of political effort, we shall see that 
there were good grounds for hesitation before ex- 
changing a policy under which the wellbeing of the 
nation had been found possible for one which, to all 
appearance, could only issue, as it has in fact issued, 
in anarchy and disaster. 

In 1833 the exclusive commercial privileges of 
the East India Company ceased, and the Canton 
trade, through which the whole of our commerce 
with China was conducted, was thrown open. The 
Government appointed Lord Napier as superinten- 
dent of the trade, and his instructions were under- 
stood to extend to regulating negotiations with the 
provincial authorities. But the provincial authorities 
had had no dealings with the former superintendent 
of the trade. It had been regulated on their side by 
a body of privileged traders, who were commonly 
called the Hong merchants. Lord Napier's claims 
to hold intercourse with the town authorities were 
totally contrary to the express laws of the empire. 

The Chinese Government were perfectly aware 
of the intended expedition; and when Lord Napier 
reached the outer waters of Canton in July 1834, the 
Hong merchants were instructed to explain to him 
the state of the case. To their request that he would 
grant them an interview he returned at once a per- 
emptory refusal. The Hong merchants endeavoured 
to make the same representations to the British mer- 
chants. Lord Napier persuaded them to decline the 
interview. In consequence of this refusal on the 
part of the English to receive official messages from 
the persons appointed by the Government for the 
purpose, the Hong merchants were requested to stop 
the trade; and on the 16th of August this was ac- 



334 ENGLAXD AND CHINA. 

tually done. Lord Najoier then took the extraor- 
dinary step of placardmg the walls of Canton with 
a proclamation of such singular insolence towards the 
Chinese authorities* as alone would have justified his 
immediate and forcible expulsion. 

The spirit in which Lord Napier undertook his 
mission will be best understood by the letters written 
by him in August to the home Government : 

" Four edicts have been let off against me for landing without 
a red chop or permit. I have been ordered off, and entreated to 
depart ; yet with all this they have not yet taken me and sent me 
down the river. Suppose a Chinaman, or any other man, were 
to land under similar cncumstances at "Whitehall, your Lordship 
would not allow him to loiter as they have permitted me. Look- 
ing at the utter imbecility of this Government, I cannot for one 
moment suppose that in treating with such a nation Her Majesty's 
Government will be ruled by the ordinary forms prescribed among 
civilised people." 

Could a buccaneer or pirate have talked otherwise? 

" Her Majesty's Government" (he goes on to say) "should con- 
sult immediately on the best plan for commanding a commercial 
treaty." '"Demand the same personal privileges for all traders 
that every trader enjoys in England. This, no doubt, would be a 
very staggering proposition in the face of a red chop ; but say to 
the Emperor, Adopt this, or abide the consequences, and it is 
done. Now, abiding consequences immediately presupposes all the 
horrors of a bloody war against a defenceless people." " 8uch an 
undertaMng ivculd de worthy the greatness and the poiver of Eng- 
land:'^ 

* See Parliamentary Papers on China, 1840, p. 33. 

-}- Papers relating to China, 1840, pp. 12, 13. It so happened that 
the minister who received this despatch was not Lord Palmerston, but 
the Duke of Welhngton, who replied by a severe and characteristic 
rebuke : " It is not by force and violence that His Majesty intends to 
establish commercial intercourse between his subjects and China, but 
by the other conciliatory measures so strongly inculcated in all the in- 
structions you have received." 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 335 

On the 7th of September Lord Napier resolved 
to resort to force. He ordered his ships of war, 
the Andromache and Imogene, to force their way, in 
direct defiance of Chinese law and of the instruc- 
tions he had received from home, through the Bocca 
Tigris, the entrance to the Canton River. The ships 
naturally drew upon themselves the fire of the forts, 
which in return they nearly demolished, and made 
their way successfully to the anchorage of Whampoa, 
under the walls of Canton. The Chinese authorities 
held their ground, however ; and their proclamation 
on the 11th repeats their refusal to hold intercourse 
with Lord Xapier, or to transact any business, 
commercial or political, until he had withdrawn his 
shij^s. A large body of the merchants now finding 
that violence failed in its effects, and that the in- 
terests of trade were seriously suffering, began to 
urge him to more conciliatory measures. In con- 
sequence of this, and also of failing health. Lord 
Napier 'at last announced his determination to yield 
and quit Canton. He died a month after at Macao. 
The trade reopened on the 27th of October, under the 
superintendence of Mr. Davis, and continued on the 
old footing. But a petition was signed by eighty-five 
merchants to the Government, requesting that a ship 
of the line with some fri2:ates mio^ht be sent to demand 
satisfaction for the insults offered to the noble super- 
intendent, and for the losses occasioned by our com- 
merce, and to endeavour to procure a renewal of the 
liberty to trade at Amoy, Tchu-san, and Ningpoo. 
This force might stop the trade of the Empire, inter- 
cept its revenue, and extort all the privileges de- 
manded. 

Any impartial reader of these events must feel 



336 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

that Lord Napier cannot be exonerated, notwith- 
standing tlie sympathy aroused by his premature 
death, from the severest censure. He was the first 
who gave the sanction of Government to the spirit 
of brutal greed and violence, the expression of which 
had hitherto been confined to our merchant princes. 
He, as far as in him lay, vitiated the moral sense of 
the nation as to our duties with China, and paved 
the way for the iniquitous war which ultimately fol- 
lowed. 

The Chinese showed, whatever they may have 
felt, but Httle ill-will for these violent and offensive 
proceedings. The Governor of Canton, through the 
Hong merchants, requested the English to have a 
commercial superintendent of trade appointed without 
delay. He refers, moderately enough, and without 
inaccuracy, to the outrageous policy of Lord Napier : 

" The said nation's king, in sending Lord Napier hither, as- 
suredly did not command him to create trouble, or ta indulge 
rashness, hastiness, and waywardness. If now there were a per- 
son from another country to go to England, and thus occasion 
commotion, the said nation's king certainly would not bear with 
him. Let a commercial man be appointed by the said nation to 
become a Superintendent, and come to Canton to direct and 
control. This is a matter of buying and selling : it is not what 
military officers can attend to the management of. In this inner 
land the Hong merchants are always held responsible, and so too 
the said nation must positively select and appoint a trading man. 
On no account should a government officer be again appointed 
to occasion, as Lord Napier did, the creation of trouble and 
disturbance."* 

While these were the modest and reasonable de- 
mands of the Chinese Government, the leading mer- 
chants of Canton, including names like Jardine, Ma- 

^ Papers relating to China, 1840, p. 55. 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 337 

tlieson, Turner, and others of the highest commercial 
standing, were petitioning the King in Council for a 
repetition, on a far larger and more aggressive scale, 
of Lord Napier's mission. They request 

" A plenipotentiary of suitable rank and diplomatic experience to 
be appointed ; that he be directed to proceed as near the capital 
of the country as may be found expedient with an armed nayal 
force ; that he require, in the name of your Majesty, ample re- 
paration for the insults offered by the Governor of Kwantung 
and Kwangse in his edicts published on the occasion of Lord 
Napier's arrival at Canton ; that he demand reparation for the 
insults offered to your Majesty's flag by firing on your Majesty's 
ships of war from the forts at the Bogue; and that remuneration 
shall be made to your Majesty's subjects for the losses they have 
sustained by the detention of their ships duriug the stoppage of 
the trade. These suggestions may be carried out without the 
slightest danger to existing commercial intercourse, inasmuch as 
there would be no difficulty, should proceedings of a compulsory 
nature be required, in putting a stop to the greater part of the 
external and internal commerce of the Chinese Empire, in inter- 
cepting its revenues in their progress to the capital, and in taking 
possession of all the armed vessels in the country."* 

It is desirable to remark that on this, as on almost 
every other occasion, it is the mercantile class which 
has taken the initiative in recommending measures of 
violence. Our Chinese and Japanese wars are not 
due solely, or even primarily, to our aristocracy. 
What our governments have done is blindly to fol- 
low a lead given elsewhere ; to submit with culpable 
weakness to the imscrupulous greed of our great 
mercantile firms ; submission, to which the difficulty 
of preserving order at home and of finding employ- 
ment for our crowded manufacturing population has 
no doubt (as Lord Palmerston frankly confessed) 
largely contributed. 

* Papers relating to China, 1840, p. 69. 

Z 



338 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

There were now two difficulties standing in the 
way of peaceable relations with China. The first 
was created by the refusal of the British Government 
to remain satisfied with the purely commercial and 
unofficial relations which had subsisted up to the 
date of the expiration of the East India Company's 
charter; relations conducted on the one side by the 
Hong merchants, and on the other by a commercial 
superintendent. It is clear that under this system 
trade had steadily and peacefully increased. There 
is little reason to doubt that it might have attained 
in this simple and honourable mamier at least its 
present dimensions, without bloodshed, disaster, and 
disgrace, and without subjecting a population of 
three , hundred millions to the horrors of anarchy 
and civil war. But there was no point upon which 
Lord Palmerston in his despatches insisted more 
strongly than that communications between the two 
countries should not be left to a mercantile superin- 
tendent, but should pass through political agents; a 
method no doubt desirable in itself, but desirable 
solely on the condition that both countries fully con- 
curred in it. For one country to insist upon it as a 
right against the will of the other, is obviously to set 
at defiance every law of nations, and to recur to the 
barbarous ordeal of brute force. In this policy, as we 
have seen, the home government was strongly stimu- 
lated by the mercantile community in China, who 
considered that, although aggressive measures might 
involve temporary derangements of trade, they would 
nltimately lead to the one load-star of their hopes, 
the "opening out of China;" the acquisition, that is 
to say, whether by fair means or by foul they cared 
not, of three hundred millions of customers. 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 339 

Such policy, however, was not carried out by- 
Sir George Eobinson, who, after the death of Lord 
Napier, was appointed superintendent. Considering 
rightly that the sole object which we could legiti- 
mately set before us was peaceful development of 
trade, just so far, and no farther, as the Chinese 
themselves were willing to cooperate with us; and 
feeling certain that to press, as Lord Napier had 
done, for direct political intercourse would lead only 
to contention, resistance, and hostility, he refrained 
altogether from the attempt. His duty as superin- 
tendent of commerce was, he conceived, as nearly as 
possible identical with that of the supercargoes of the 
East Lidia Company before 1834. To him the most 
difficult- and the most important object was not con- 
tention with Chinese officials, but the preservation 
of order amongst British subjects; restraint of that 
unscrupulous lawlessness of our own merchants and 
seamen, which, by the confession of all our agents 
in the East, is the chief obstacle to peaceful com- 
merce.* But there was this difference in his position 
and that of the East India Company's supercargo: 
the latter had it always in his power to recommend 
the withdrawal of the license without which no ship 
could trade with China. But by the alterations of 
the Charter in 1834 the whole trade was thrown 
open ; and the powers of the superintendent to ad- 
judicate in disputes of merchants, among themselves 
or with the natives, were left utterly vague and un- 
defined. We find Lord Palmer ston two years after- 
wards, in November 1836, recognising, m despatches 
to Captain Elliott, the inconvenience of this unde- 

* On this point see the Memorial of Sir R. Alcock, akeady re- 
ferred to. 



340 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

filled state of the jurisdiction of the superintendents 
in China, and their want of power to enforce deci- 
sions on matters submitted to them by the commer- 
cial body: hoping that "at no distant period some 
effectual remedy may be provided for this incon- 
venience;" and recommending him ''at present to 
confine his interference as much as possible to friendly 
suggestion and advice to the parties concerned."* 
Thus for some years things were left entirely to the 
most disorderly haphazard. It was probably not with- 
out reason that they were so left. Out of the nettle, 
chaos, it was hoped that the flower, profit, might be 
extracted. Sir G. Kobinson, however, animated by 
no such thoughts, urgently recommended the deci- 
sion of this vital question. The duties, according to 
him, of the head of the British establishment should 
be, " to receive the registers and papers of ships 
arriving; and to issue precise and distinct orders for 
the guidance of captains and seamen, who should 
appeal to him in all serious cases of disturbance and 
complaint on board ship, and invariably on every 
occasion when natives of China are concerned, in 
place of taking the law into their own hands, and 
seeking to redress their real or imaginary grievances ; 
to listen patiently to any Chmese who may be ag- 
grieved, and by the power with which he is invested 
to afford them redress and if possible indemnification ; 
to attend to the better ordering and discipline of the 
ships, by watchful observation over both commanders 
and seamen ; and by every means in his power to im- 
prove and ameliorate the present disorganised state 
of the mercantile marine. "f 

* Papers relating to China, 1840, p. 128. 
t Ibid. 1840, p. 116. 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 341 

In pursuance of tMs quiescent policy, Robinson 
entirely abandoned all attempts to force himself upon 
Canton, and established his head-quarters at Macao ; 
residing frequently, for the convenience of merch- 
ants, in a government vessel, near the anchorage of 
Lintin, an island in the mouth of the Canton river, 
about sixty miles from the city of Canton. This 
policy was perfectly acceptable to the Chinese autho- 
rities; and it had also the advantage that Lintin 
bemg the great smuggling station, the presence of 
the superintendent, as Sir G. Eobinson pointed out, 
was pecuHarly desirable as a check on British irre- 
gularities. But neither this nor the gradual increase 
of British trade, which went on steadily for two 
years, compensated, in the eyes either of the home 
government or of the merchants, for abstinence from 
more ao;OTessive measures. In the summer of 1836 
Lord Palmerston recalled Sir G. Eobinson, and re- 
placed him by Captain EUiott, who had hitherto been 
his subordinate; giving the latter earnest injunctions 
to lose no opportunity that might offer of establish- 
ing himself at Canton. 

Such, then, was the first of the two obstacles to 
peaceful relations with China. The second was of 
still greater importance. It was the illegitimate 
trade in opium. At the beginning of the century 
the consumption of opium in China had abeady be- 
come so considerable as to attract the attention of 
the Chinese Government, and it was thought desira- 
ble to prohibit its importation. But since the death 
in 1796 of the Emperor Kien-lung the energy of the 
Chinese executive had been much enfeebled ; and it 
was found very difficult to prevent entirely the im- 
portation of this poisonous drug by smugglers. To 



342 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

this illegal trade the East India Company have from 
the first been accessory. In Bengal no person is 
allowed to grow opium except on account of the 
Government. In Bombay the Government purchase 
all that is produced within the Presidency, and de- 
rive a large revenue from that which is grown in 
Central India, and brought down to the coast.* 
The amount smuggled into China in 1800 was 4,570 
chests; in 1824 the number had increased to 12,023; 
and in 1834 to 23,902 chests ; the profits derived 
from this last amount by the East India Company 
being 1, 111, 038 /.f The smuggling trade was carried 
on more or less at every part of the Chinese sea- 
board, but principally on the south coast and in the 
Canton river. The island of Lintin, at the mouth of 
the river, was notoriously a principal station for the 
receipt of opium from British ships. The trade was 
by no means left to firms of inferior standing. We 
have it on the best authority, that is, from the evi- 
dence of Messrs. Jardine, Matheson, and other firms 
of equal wealth and reputation, that they themselves, 
"in common with nine-tenths of the foreign mer- 
chants in China, were largely engaged in this unlaw- 
ful trafiic." Up to 1836 their excuse had always 
been, that it was connived at by the local officials, 
and even by the Chinese Government itself. And 
it is certain that many of the Cantonese mandarins 
were accessible to bribes, and that some of them 
even participated actively in the trade ; which is not 
much more than might be said of people of wealth 
and standing in our own coast towns during the pre- 
valence of high protective or prohibitive duties. It 

* Statistical Papers on India, presented to Parliament April 1853. 
t Papers relating to the Opium Trade, 1842-1856, p. 50. 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 343 

is certain too that the Imperial Government, though 
it had never withdrawn its formal prohibition of the 
trade, had of late years shown a culpable want of 
energy in suppressing it. But after 1836 this excuse 
became utterly null and void. The rapid increase in 
the sale of opium forced its mischievous consequences, 
whether to health, to social order, or to revenue, 
upon the attention of the Government ; and reports 
on the subject from the Cantonese merchants, from 
the governor of Canton, and from several of the 
emperor's ministers, were laid before the Privy 
Council. We are in possession of several of these 
documents ; and they show that the question was 
discussed in a truly statesmanlike manner. It was 
thought by some that the legalisation of the trade 
would be the wisest alternative. The efflux of silver 
from the country, due to the fact that opium smug- 
glers were not in a position to barter their produce 
for bulky goods like tea and silk, but necessarily re- 
ceived their price in the more commodious shape 
of coin, might, it was thought, be obviated by this 
measure. The same laws which forbade the ex- 
change of English manufactures for any thing but 
native China produce would then be extended to 
opium. Further, the contempt for law, which all in- 
fraction of it on a large scale must produce, would 
be remedied. But on the other side it was argued, 
that to make the infraction of law an excuse for its 
abolition was a most dangerous precedent, a symp- 
tom of weakness which no sfovernment could afford 
to acknowledo^e. Moreover, the le2:alisation of the 
opium trade, even if it diminished the export of sil- 
ver, would leave untouched a far more serious evil ; 
the ruinous effect of the poison upon national health. 



344 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

^'Is it not known," said the Councillor Choo-Tsun, "that 
when the Government enacts a law, there is necessarily an infrac- 
tion of that law ? and though the law should sometimes be re- 
laxed, and become ineffectual, yet surely it should not on that 
account be abolished ; any more than we would altogether cease 
to eat because of diseased stoppage of the throat. When have 
not prostitution, gambling, treason, robbery, and sucli like in- 
fractions of the laws afforded occasions for extortionate under- 
lings to benefit themselves, and by falsehood and bribery to 
amass wealth ? Yet none surely would contend that the law, 
because in such instances rendered ineffectual, should therefore 
be abrogated. The laws that forbid the people to do wrong may 
be likened to the dikes that prevent the overflowing of water. 
If any one, then, urging that the dikes are very old and therefore 
useless, should have them thrown down, what words could express 
the consequences of the impetuous rush and all-destroying over- 
flow?" "The widespreading and baneful influence of opium, 
when regarded simply as injurious to property, is of inferior im- 
portance ; but when regarded as hurtful to the people, it demands 
most serious consideration ; for in the people lies the very founda- 
tion of the empire. A deficiency of property may be supplied, 
and an impoverished people improved ; whereas it is beyond the 
power of any artificial means to save a people enervated by 
luxury." " And if the camp be once contaminated, the baneftil 
influence will work its way, and the habit will be contracted 
beyond the power of reform. When the periodical times of 
desire for it come round, how can the victims, their legs totter- 
ing, their hands trembling, their eyes flowing with childish tears, 
be able in any way to attend to their proper exercises ? How 
can such men form strong and powerful legions ?"* 

These views, to the eternal honour of the Chinese 
Government, prevailed. Not the legalisation of opium, 
but rigorous prohibition of it, was resolved upon. The 
measures to be taken were indicated clearly enough 
by the sub-censor, Heu-Kew. 

" From old times it has been a maxim in reference to our 
foreign relations to deal closely with what is within, but to deal 

'^- Memorial to the Emperor from Choo-Tsun. Parliam. Papers, 
pp. 168-172. See note on opium at the end of this Essay. 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 345 

in general with what is without ; first to govern oneself, and then 
only to govern others. We must therefore, in the first place, turn 
to the traitorous natives who sell the drug, the Hong merchants 
who arrange the transactions, the brokers who purchase whole- 
sale, the boat people who convey the drug, and the naval officers 
who receive bribes; and having with the utmost strictness dis- 
covered and apprehended these offenders, we must inflict on them 
the severest punishments of the law." 

Then the foreigners were to be dealt with: 
Messrs. Jardine, Dent, and several others specified, 
who were known to be owners of the opium " re- 
ceiving-ships" stationed at Lintin, were to leave 
Canton, and retire to IMacao, and ultimately to their 
own country. The superintendent. Captain Elliott, 
was also to be urged to use all his power to send 
away the two receiving- ships.* 

The date at which this policy was announced, 
October 1836, is important to remark. It will be 
seen that two years and a half elapsed before the 
Chinese Government took the final step of confisca- 
tion, which plunged them into war. Their policy 
meanwhile never swerved ; unremitting attempts 
were made, and with increasing success, to control 
and punish their o^vn subjects. All peaceable means 
were used to induce the English authorities to co- 
operate with them in preventing smuggling, but in 
vain. It is certain that every candid and careful 
reader of the Parliamentary Papers will come to the 
conclusion that patient and indulgent long-sufifering, 
a conciliatory spirit, and a willingness to sink minor 
difi*erences for the main point at issue, a point in 
which it might have been supposed impossible for 
any two civihsed governments to differ, characterised 
the Chinese policy during this long interval. What 

* Papers on China, p. 176. 



346 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

meantime v/as the English policy, and what were 
the motives which actuated it ? Were enero;etic and 
straightforward attempts made to cooperate with 
China in liberating the commerce of the two coun- 
tries from a disgraceful scandal and from an immi- 
nent danger ; or was reckless commercial avarice 
suffered to take its course unbridled ; or was the 
purchase of Sycee silver thought too precious to be 
risked; or was the monopolised and illegal sale of 
noxious poison too valuable a prop to the tottermg 
finance of India to be surrendered lightly ; or, lastly, 
were the sure results of inaction boldly faced by an 
unscrupulous minister, confident that a long course 
of private aggression, unsanctioned yet unopposed by 
Government, would lead sooner or later to indignant 
reprisals, carried on in technical ignorance of Euro- 
pean usage, and thus furnishing the pretext for still 
further interference, ending in further extension per- 
haps of British rule, or still better in the extortion 
of fresh markets, to appease the angry temper of Lan- 
cashire factories? 

From each or all of these motives, it is certain 
that the remonstrances of the Chinese Government 
were met by the English authorities in. a spirit of 
dishonourable evasion. In February 1837 Elhott 
writes to Lord Palmerston : 

" The fact that such an article as opium should have grown 
to be by far the most important part of our import trade is of 
itself a source of painful reflection. But," he adds, " the import- 
ance of this branch of the trade is by no means to be estimated 
solely by the very large amount to which it figures in the list of 
imports. A consideration of far more moment is, that the move- 
ment of money at Canton has come to depend, by force of circum- 
stances, almost entirely on the deliveries of opium outside. I 
need not insist on the intense inconvenience of a disappearance 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 347 

of cash from a market where eager competitors are purchasing 
the main body of their retm^ns fi'om a close association of native 
dealers."* 

Towards the end of the year the stringent mea- 
sures taken by the Chinese had produced " a com- 
plete and very hazardous change in the whole manner 
of conducting, the trade." Opium had hitherto been 
conveyed in native boats from the English receiving- 
ships to the shore ; but now " the native boats have 
been burnt, and the native smugglers scattered. The 
opium trade is carried on, and a great part of it in- 
wards to Whampoa, in European passage-boats belong- 
ing to British owners." Elliott suggests that a spe- 
cial commissioner shall be sent out from England to 
deal Avith the opium question; this commissioner to 
explain to the Chinese Government that " Her Majesty 
being without the power to prevent or to regulate 
this trade, anxiously desired its legalisation." 

It was not till June 1838, four years subsequent 
to the transfer of English commerce from the East 
India Company to the British Government, that the 
first utterance upon a subject so vital to the pacific 
relations of the two countries issued from the Home 
Ofiice. " Her Majesty's Government," writes Lord 
Palmerston, " cannot interfere for the purpose of 
enabling British subjects to violate the laws of the 
country to which they trade. Any loss, therefore, 
which such persons may suffer in consequence of the 
more effectual execution of the Chinese laws on this 
subject, must* be borne by the parties who have 
brought that loss on themselves by their own acts."f 
With regard to Elliott's suggestion of a special com- 
missioner, ''Her Majesty's Government do not see 

* Parliamentary Papers, p. 190. f Ibid. pp. 243-246. 



348 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

their way in such a measure with sufficient clearness 
to justify them in adopting it at the present mo- 
ment."* All was to be left to the chapter of acci- 
dents; and shortly after this despatch reached China 
the accident, it is difficult not to say the desired 
accident, arrived. 

The vigorous measures of the Chinese Govern- 
ment against opium were thoroughly efficient so far 
as the native dealers in the drug were concerned. 
In January 1839 Elliott writes, that the stagnation 
of the opium trade may be said to have "been nearly 
complete for the last four months. The consequent 
locking-up of the circulating medium is already pro- 
ducing great and general embarrassment." But the 
fountain-head of evil was still untouched. At the 
island of Lintin, near the mouth of the Canton river, 
and within the limits of what was recognised by all 
parties as the port of Canton, there still lay at anchor 
ten English warehousing - vessels, containing more 
than 20,000 chests of opium, illegally imported from 
India by our merchant princes of Canton. Over and 
over again during two years had the Chinese autho- 
rities requested and entreated Elliott, as the professed 
superintendent of British trade, to send these ships 
away. Shuffling evasion had been the only answer. 
He was the superintendent only of the regular trade; 
he could take no cognisance of any other. Leniency 
and persuasion proving utterly useless, the Govern- 
ment resolved to resort, as they had the most un- 
doubted right to do, to forcible measfires. Imagine 
a company of Chinese merchants stationing them- 
selves with cargoes of tea at Gravesend, and selling 
it to native smugglers ; or when that was found diffi- 
* Parliamentary Papers, 1840, p. 260. 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 349 

cult, carrying it themselves in their o"VYn boats on 
shore. Suppose, too, what is certainly not likely, 
that in consideration of their being foreigners from 
a distant part of the world, the Custom-house autho- 
rities were unwilling at once to proceed to extreme 
measures, but merely requested the Chinese Consul 
to order his countrymen out of British waters, and 
that the Consul distinctly refused to do any thing of 
the sort, alleging either that he had not been treated 
with sufficient respect, or that he had nothing to 
do with any thing but legitimate trade, or otherwise 
shuffling the question, how much longer sufferance 
would in a like case have been shown? And if the 
leading Chinese merchants in London were noto- 
riously known to be engaged in this illegitimate 
trade, would they too have been held irresponsible? 
And if the whole cargoes of these smuggling ships 
had been confiscated, would that have been regarded as 
an unwarrantable infringement of the law of nations? 
And finally, if we suppose that the cargo confiscated 
consisted not of tea, a useful commodity, subject to 
a fixed duty for purposes of revenue, but of some 
article utterly prohibited on grounds of public mo- 
rality, as, for instance, of licentious engravings, would 
that have added to the sympathy which the unsuc- 
cessful smugglers might hope to receive from their 
own country or from the civilised world? 

In March 1839, Lin, High Imperial Commissioner 
of the Pekin court, arrived at Canton, with special 
orders to put the law into execution. He at once 
issued an order, addressed to " foreigners of all na- 
tions," to the effect that the foreign merchants were 
at once to deliver up to Government every particle 
of the opium on board their storeships : 



350 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

" Let it be ascertained by the Hong merchants who are the 
parties so delivering it np, and what number of chests, as also 
what total quantity in catties and taels is delivered up under each 
name. Let these particulars be presented to Grovemment, in order 
that the opium may all be received in plain conformity thereto, 
that it may be bm^nt and destroyed, and that the evil may be 
entirely extirpated." 

A bond was to be signed by the foreign mer- 
chants, that for the future they would altogether 
abstain from all attempts to introduce opium into the 
country : 

" I have heard," he continued, " that you foreigners are used 
to attach great importance to the word *good faith.' If, then, 
you will really do as I have commanded, deliver up every particle 
of the opium that is already here, and will stay its future intro- 
duction, .... the past may be left unnoticed You will 

continue to enjoy the advantages of commercial intercourse, will 
be enabled to acquire profits by an honest trade; and will you not 
indeed stand in a most honourable position ? If, however, you 
obstinately adhere to your folly, and refuse to awake; if you think 
to make up a tale covering over your illicit dealings, and pretend 
that the opium is brought by foreign seamen, and that the. mer- 
chants have nothing to do with it; or that you will carry it back 
to your countries and throw it into the sea; or take occasion to 
go to other provinces in search of a door of consumption; or 
deliver up only one-tenth or two-tenths of the whole quantity; 
in any of these cases it will be evident that you retain a spirit of 

contumacy, that you uphold vice, and will not reform 

I have brought with me from the capital full powers and privi- 
leges enabling me to perform what seems to me right; and so 
long as the opium trafiic remains unexterminated, so long will I 
delay my return. I swear that I will progress with this matter 
from its beginning to its ending, and that no stopping half-way 
shall for a moment be indulged."* 

This order was issued on the 17th of March: 
three days were given for its fulfilment. It was 

* Parliamentary Papers, p. 353. 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 351 

treated with silent contempt by those to whom it was 
addressed ; and the only effect it produced on Captain 
EUiott was that he communicated at once mth a Bri- 
tish vessel-of-war that was stationed at Macao, with 
the view of taking '* prompt measures to meet the un- 
just and menacing dispositions of the Chinese authori- 
ties." The three days having elapsed, Commissioner 
Lin placed a cordon of armed boats round the foreign 
factories of Canton, informing their inhabitants that 
they would not be allowed to leave them until the 
opium stored up in the ships at Lintin had been 
dehvered up. Xo personal violence whatever was 
offered. Coolies, under strict surveillance, were al- 
lowed to pass through the barrier of boats, and bring 
them food and necessaries. On the 27th of March 
Elliott took upon himself the responsibility of order- 
ing the merchants to give up the opium to him for 
delivery to the Chinese Government, "holding himself 
responsible, in the most full and unreserved manner, 
for and on the behalf of Her Majesty's Govermnent, 
to all and each of Her Majesty's subjects surrender- 
ing the said British-owned opium into his hands, to 
be dehvered over to the Chinese Government." These 
orders were obeyed. The opium, m all 20,283 
chests, valued at from two to three millions sterhng, 
was surrendered and destroyed in the course of the 
next two months; and with the completion of the 
delivery the blockade of the factories was discon- 
tinued. 

Such was the cause which the war of 1840 was 
undertaken to avenge. As a stain ujDon European 
civilisation that war is perhaps unparalleled. Of un- 
just wars history is full to overflowing, but not of 
wars imdertaken by civilised nations in defence of 



352 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

rapacious and lawless buccaneers. Its results, both 
in China and in England, will long be felt. In China 
it gave a shock to the established government of the 
country, which is generally allowed to count for much 
in the terrible anarchy under which she is now labour- 
ing. In England, whose Oriental poKcy had been 
demoralised already by a long course of Indian ag- 
gression, it was the starting-point of similar policy 
towards the other nations of the East. Territorial 
conquest is not, and it may be has never been, the 
principal aim. The forcible satisfaction, not of the 
destructive military instinct, but of the acquisitive 
trading instinct, not less self-seeking and brutish 
than the other, has been the motive power. In 
the absence of any higher controlling principle, that 
motive has pushed forward to its gratification in 
reckless disregard of moral obligation; and the lust 
of trading with Eastern nations whether they will or 
not has been elevated into a right. 

Into the details of the war it would be needless 
to enter; its origin and results alone concern us. It 
was closed in August 1842 by the treaty of Nanldn. 

The principal terms of this treaty were: (1) that 
five ports were to be opened for British trade : Can- 
ton, Amoy, Eoo-chow, Ningpo, and Shanghai, the 
Chinese being bound to admit English goods at a 
duty absurdly moderate when compared with that 
imposed in England on Chinese commodities; (2) 
that the Chinese Government should pay six million 
dollars as the value of the destroyed opium, three 
million dollars on account of debts due to British 
subjects by Hong merchants, and twelve million 
dollars for the expenses of the war; (3) that the 
island of Hong-Kong was to be ceded to Great 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 353 

Britain. Of all the provisions of the treaty this last 
has assuredly not proved the least disastrous. 

All these provisions, with one exception, were 
carried out. Four out of the five ports were opened 
to trade. But at Canton the hostile feeling had be- 
come so fierce, not mth the governing classes only, 
but with the mass of the inhabitants, that the English 
Government deferred, with great reluctance, to the 
representations of the Chinese authorities, and influ- 
enced also, it may be presumed, by the indignation 
which so flagrant a war was beginning to arouse at 
home, put off" the enforcement of their treaty-right 
till a more convenient season. 

So matters went on with apparent tranquillity, or 
at least with no disturbance that aroused European 
attention, for fourteen years. All that time, however, 
the evils inherent in the very nature of our policy 
were accumulating their explosive forces swiftly and 
surely. Sooner or later, and none knew it better 
than the statesmen of Pekin and London, the mine 
would spring more fatally, or more efficiently, than 
before. Eecall for a moment the position. On the 
one side a simple and ancient civilisation, with 
thoughts and hopes narrower certauily than ours, 
yet still Avith a moral standard, with a theory of life 
and duty which we should do well not to despise f 
a social system elaborate and coherent, but, as it so 
chanced, on the brink not of decay, but of one of the 
periodic crises to which once in two or three cen- 
turies it has been ever liable ; a people m all indus- 
trial pursuits strenuous and physically strong, but 
loving peace, and utterly unversed in war ; ignorant 

* For the degree to wliich this standard is practically observed, see 
note at the end of the Essay. 

AA 



354 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

of Western civilisation, not standing in need of it, and 
having many reasons, moral and political, for dread- 
ing further knowledge of it: such, on one side, was 
the situation. On the other, unrestricted commerce 
in the hands of men of superior skill and cunning ; 
men "whose souls," to use the bitter words of the 
Cantonese Governor, "were cauterised by gain-seek- 
ing desires;" these men with an armed force at their 
back to protect their claims, and leave their crimes 
unpunished; crimes connived at by a government 
totally devoid of any higher principle than to push 
trade at all hazards, to find employment for their 
own crowded populations,* and thus to escape for a 
brief moment, by any shift, honest or scandalous, 
from the imminent pressure of terrible social pro- 
blems. 

These were the two elements which the treaty of 
Nankin brought into close and hateful contact. There 
was yet a third element ; an evil from which the peace- 
ful industrious population of China had always suf- 
fered, but which under the fostering influence of 
European intervention has grown with fungus-like 
rapidity. That element was piracy. The refuse of 
Oriental populations had always haunted the Chinese 
waters. The refuse of European populations now 

m u Those who wish to change the policy at present pursued, to 
narrow our foreign markets, and to stifle the development of our 
foreign trade, are doing their best to take the bread from our working 
classes, and to deprive them of the means of sustenance. ... It is the 
duty of the Government to endeavour by every means in its power to 
extend the commerce of the country, not for the advantage of par- 
ticular individuals, but for the purpose of aiding the development of 
the industry of the country, and thus rendering the industrious classes, 
who produce the different commodities, happy and prosperous at 
home." Palmerston's reply to Bright and Cobden, China Debate, 
May 31, 1864. 



. ENGLxiND AND CHINA. 355 

joined them. It is probably no exaggeration to say 
that, in no place and at no period in the history of 
the world has smuggling, piracy, and every inter- 
mediate shade of nautical crime, obtained such di- 
mensions, and flourished with such impunity, as in 
the Chinese waters, for the last twenty years. 

Let us see what English policy has done to 
modify or to favour this result. 

The island of Hong-Kong, at the time of its ac- 
quisition by Great Britain in 1842, contained two or 
three hundred inhabitants; it now contains 70,000 or 
80,000, the great bulk being Chinese. Its growth 
is thus comparable to that of Singapore, and is due 
doubtless in part to the same cause — namely, its 
being a free port. Commercially speaking, the 
colony has more than answered the expectations 
of its founders. Sir John Bowring, the hero of free 
trade, and the professed enemy of offensive war, was 
appomted its governor. Morally the results have 
been less promising. The Chinese, who flocked to 
the new colony, were naturally men of a class to 
whom the removal of every restriction imposed by 
their own social and political system, operated as a 
strong attraction. Speaking broadly, and with due 
allowance for exceptions, the population of Hong- 
Kong contained and contains the basest and most 
lawless of the Chinese race. Free from the surveil- 
lance of their own police, and subject to a lax govern- 
ment, whose total law and gospel was the advance- 
ment of British commerce, they found at Hong-Kong 
singular facilities for prosecuting every species of un- 
lawful trade. Registers were given to any Chinese 
shipoAvner who happened to be resident within the 
colony, authorising him to carry the British flag, and 



356 ENGLAND AND CHINA,. 

to avail himself of all the impunity which it offered. 
The evils of such a system forced themselves upon 
the most unwilling eyes. " A vessel," said Sir J. 
Bowring in 1855, "no sooner obtains a register than 
she escapes colonial jurisdiction, carries on her trade 
within the waters of China, engages probably in 
every sort of fraudulent dealings, and may never 
again appear to render any account of her proceed- 
ings, or to be made responsible for her illegal acts."* 
Yet the very man who said this was himself in- 
strumental, in the very same year in which he said 
it, in passing a special " ordmance for the regis- 
tration of colonial vessels at Hong-Kong." The 
sole conditions under which this permission to carry 
the British flag was given were that the applicant 
should rent land in Hono^-Kono;, that securities should 
be given by the owner to comply with "the laws 
binding on British subjects with regard to trade with 
China," and that her master should be either a British 
subject or a person conversant with the English lan- 
guage. The register was to be renewed from year 
to year. The colony of Hong-Kong at the time this 
ordinance was passed, had a Chinese population of 
60,000; but it "hardly contained ten Chinese who 
could legally be called British subjects, for it had 
not been deemed advisable to naturalise the Chinese 
here."f It may be thought that the supervision of 
the Hong-Kong authorities was sufficient to secure 

'■■' Correspondence respecting Registration of Colonial Vessels at 
Hong-Kong, p. 1. Nothing, to a reader of the Blue-books, is more 
astounding than the strong language used by men like Bowring, 
Meadows, Alcock, Bruce, and other officials, as to the destructive and 
disastrous consequences of their own policy. One wonders that such 
men can be found to do such work. 

t Ibid. p. 6. 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 357 

the respectability of the holder of registers. The 
follomng facts will quickly undeceive any one who 
may entertain such a view. They will be thought 
mcredible until it be seen how unimpeachable is my 
authority for stating them. I quote from a despatch 
of Sir Hercules Kobinson, who succeeded Sir J. Bow- 
ring as governor, to the Duke of Newcastle, presented 
to Parliament m 1862, giving the result of an official 
inquiry into the abuses of the colony, and especially 
into the alleged crimes of a Mr. Caldwell. 

" Machow-Wong, a native of the city of Namtao in Sunon, 
became leagued with the pirates of the coast, was denounced to 
the mandarins, and fled here shortly after the formation of the 
colony. Upon his arrival here he became ostensibly a fishmonger; 
but his principal occupation was said to be the disposal of the 
plunder of his confederates on the sea and land, for he was not 
long in organising a band of thieves. Triad-street coolies, &c., 
besides his old friends on the water, whom he also supplied with 
provisions. Soon after his arrival he became known to Mr. 
Caldwell, and for years was Mr. Caldwell's principal and most 
relied-upon informant. His influence and intimacy with Mr. 
Caldwell invested him with immense power : he was a terror to 
the bulk of the community, and tyrannised over the lower orders 
of Chinese, without their daring to complain. Public repute 
pronounced him to be an extortioner, a recipient of bribes from 
gambling-houses, a confederate of pirates, and a receiver of stolen 
goods. His name was never mentioned without being coupled 
with some epithet having reference to his bad character ; but he 
was held in such dread that Chinese of standing and property, 
who exhibited a knowledge of his evil character, would not 
appear against him, as they said they were in terror of their lives 
on account of him. That Machow-Wong had been for many 
years before his conviction intimately connected with pirates and 
piracy, was notorious throughout the colony. He, and others in 
confederacy with him, it is asserted, and I believe with truth, 
kept a hong, at which the goods obtained by piracy were received 
and disposed of, and where pirates were supplied with arms and 
ammunition. He was the known protector of pirates and other 



358 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

ruffians resorting to the island, and when they were charged with 
offences against the law, he provided them with professional as- 
sistance, intimidated or qnieted complainants or witnesses, and 
by the exercise of the great influence which he possessed, fre- 
quently contrived to obstruct or prevent the course of justice. 
There is no doubt that Machow-Wong had the power, through 
Mr. Caldwell, of directing the movements of the ships of war 
against pirates, or alleged pirates, whenever he pleased ; and it is 
asserted that he made use of this power to levy a species of black 
mail on the piratical fleets on the coast. So long as they con- 
tinued their payments they were permitted to go on ; but in case 
of default or disagreement, he denounced them to the authorities, 
and they were hunted down and captured by British gun-boats, 
until they were either exterminated or came in and made their 
peace with him. I see no reason to doubt that Machow-Wong 
thus made himself the arbiter of the fate of all pirates, by giving 
information to such of them as were under his protection of the 
movements of her Majesty's ships, and by launching against 
others the British naval power. He had unquestionably the 
power to do so if he pleased." "At last justice overtook this 
notorious offender; he was arraigned at the August criminal 
sessions of 1857, upon two charges of confederating with pirates^ 
and was sentenced to fifteen years transportation." " Such was 
the character of this man, with whom Mr. Caldwell admits he 
had a long and intimate connection."""' 

Mr. Caldwell is an Anglo- Chinese half-caste, who, 
after the war of 1842, settled in Hong-Kong, and for 
twenty years enjoyed the confidence of Sir John Bow- 
ring, Sir Michael Seymour, and the other high officials 
of the colony, to an extraordinary degree. He held the 
positions of " Protector- General of Chinese," and Re- 
ofistrar- General, and was a Justice of the Peace. The 
Blue-books are full of the most complimentary expres- 
sions lavished on him by the authorities, for his valu- 
able services.! Hi^ exposure was due mainly to the 

^^ Despatch from the Governor of Hong-Kong, printed July 1862. 
-j- See Sir J. Bowring's despatches to Home Government, in the 
Blue-books of 1860, relating to Hong-Kong, pp. 1, 179, 274, 280. 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 35^ 

untiring energy of Mr. Chisliolm Anstey, the Attor- 
ney-General, v/ho met with the greatest obstacles 
from the Governor and the acting Colonial Secretary, 
in pressing his charges. Mr. Caldwell's case was at 
last inquired into by a colonial commission, and he 
was found not guilty. Mr. Anstey was recalled in 
1858, at the request of Sir John Bowring, for bring- 
ing vexatious charges, "in a spirit of malignant per- 
secution, against a valuable public servant." '^ Mr. 
Anstey, when in London, so far succeeded in con- 
vincing the Home Government of the goodness of 
his case, that a fresh inquiry was ordered by the 
Duke of Newcastle, which resulted in substantiating, 
as the despatch from which I have quoted shows, 
the most serious accusations that Mr. Anstey had 
made. 

Sir Hercules Eobinson goes on to state in this 
despatch, that Caldwell not merely assisted Machow- 
Wong in his difficulties, but that he was joint-owner 
with* him of a well-known piratical lorcha, registered 
at liong-Kong, and therefore carrying, like so many 
others, the British flag ; and that he had in his em- 
ploy a certain Beaver, one of the most notorious 
pirates of the Chinese vv^aters. The power that he 
wielded over the British navy appears to have been 
limitless. "Mr. Caldwell was intrusted with the 
power of obtaining on his own authority alone the 
services of men-of-war to proceed in search of alleged 
pirates ; for nothing further was required of him 
than to say that he had received information of 
an act of piracy, and that with no greater formality 
than this he should apply personally to the senior 
naval officer for the assistance of one or more ships 

* Sir J. Bo\vriiig's Despatches to Home Government, p. 274. 



360 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

of war, embark himself in one of them, describe the 
place to which they should proceed, and point out 
the vessel or place to be attacked." 

A specimen of this method of procedure is the 
following : One of the partners of the piratical re- 
ceiving-store of Mr. CaldweU's friend, Machow-Wong, 
was a certain Seeko belonging to the village of Kup- 
chee, on the Chinese coast, more than a hundred 
miles north of Hong-Kong. One of his junks was 
captured by pirates. He complained to Mr. Caldwell, 
who at once, on his own authority, despatched Cap- 
tain Whyniatt of the Nimrod, with two other gun- 
boats, in pursuit. They could not catch the joirates ; 
but a statement was made that part of the cargo had 
been landed at another village, Hutung. The in- 
habitants of Hutung admitted this, but asserted that 
it had been removed by the pirates. There was no 
proof whatever that the inhabitants of Hutung were 
in any way implicated in the transaction; they 
were not even accused of having committed any act 
of piracy on the high seas. Let Captain Whyniatt 
now tell the remainder of the story : 

" On the following morning (April 5th, 1859) I returned to 
Hutung, and landed with the armed boats, and through Mr. Cald- 
well demanded that they should deliver up the cargoes. They 
admitted that a portion of the cargo, to the amount of two thou- 
sand dollars, had been landed there, but was not there at that 
time, excepting two hundred bags of sugar, which had been ran- 
somed by the owner.^^ I therefore, with the concurrence of Mr. 
Caldwell, told them that they must pay an indemnity of one 
thousand dollars, giving two hours for consideration ; at the end 
of which time, if my demand was not acceded to, I should set fire 
to the town. Having waited two hours and upwards without their 

* Thus Hutung had probably suffered from the pirates as much 
as Kup-chee. 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 361 

showing any signs of coming to terms, I fired a few rockets at 
intervals over the town, when they ultimately consented to pay 
the money by a given time; upon which I returned to the ship, 
informing them, that unless the agreement were fulfilled, I should 
adopt more severe measures in the morning. At ten o'clock p.m. 
a boat came on board with a note for the amount, duly attested 
by the elders of Kup-chee, who were perfectly satisfied, and ex- 
pressed their thanks for the service we had rendered them. 

" In conclusion, I must beg to bring to your notice the zealous 
manner in which the duties were performed by the officers com- 
manding the gun-boats. I have &c. 

" S. J. Whyniatt, Acting Commander" * 

"If," continues Sir Hercules Eobinson, "the mere 
lanclino' of a cargo captured at sea would justify 
firing a town, I fear a similar pretext might be found 
daily for the bombardment of the capital of Hong- 
Kong." 

What was done to Mr. Caldwell? The same 
punishment was inflicted upon him that was inflicted 
upon Mr. Anstey for having annoyed the colony by 
exposing him. He was dismissed from the public 
service. In one respect his punishment was lighter 
than Mr. Anstey's. Mr. Anstey's disgrace, after 
such ample proof that it was unmerited, has not been 
cancelled. He has never been restored to office. 
Mr. Caldwell has been more fortunate. He practises 
at this moment, or at least was practising a few 
months ago, as official arbitrator in the Small Causes 
Court at Hong-Kong.f So little did the result of 

'^' Despatch from Governor of Hong-Kong, 1862, pp. 1-18. Well 
indeed might one of the most distinguished commanders in our navy 
say, as he said not long ago to a friend of mine, when speaking of 
these and similar occurrences, " We had to obey orders ; hut ivefelt all 
the time that ive ivere doing pirates' loorh^ Yet they could retain their 
commissions ! 

t This was written in 1863. 



362 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

this trial affect his reputation in the best society at 
Hong-Kong, that within a few clays of its conclusion 
in Sept. 1861, he was invited to a Freemasons' ban- 
quet, at Yfhich the Colonial Secretary himself * pre- 
sided. 

When, in 1842, Sir H. Pottinger and Sir J. 
Davis recommended the seizure of Hong-Kong as 
the site for a British colony, it was said by them, 
and perhaps thought sincerely, that " its free and 
noble institutions would stand one day as a model 
whereby to work the regeneration of the Chinese 
empire itself." The world, imperfect as it maybe, 
is yet not so organised that its regeneration is to be 
achieved by self-complacent injustice. Founded in 
violence, greed, and fraud, our stronghold on the 
Chinese coast had become a nest of flagrant piracy, 
carried on for years Avith the sufferance, if not the 
connivance of English gentlemen, in which English 
ships of war have been, however unconsciously, ac- 
cessories, and in which the person who took the part 
above described still enjoys the confidence of some of 
the highest officials in the colony. 

We are now in a position to judge of the last 
China war, the events of which being more fresh in 
the memory, may be discussed very briefly. 

The facility with which Chinese coasting vessels 
could obtain permission to carry the British flag, by 
procuring a Hong-Kong register, has been already 
explained. The object of the system, as stated by the 
colonial treasurer, was to bring trade to Hong-Kong, 
and make it an entrepot for British manufactures. 
"It has already," he says in 1855, "added to, and 
still tends to mcrease the coasting trade in goods 
the manufacture of Great Britain, or the produce of 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 363 

India, such as cotton, opium,* &c., and on the other 
hand brings to this colony more of the produce of 
China for export to Europe and India, or transship- 
ment to other parts of the coast of the empire."f 

Smugglers and pirates gladly availed themselves 
of Hong-Kong registers. The events of 1842 had 
taught them the immunity which they would be 
likely to enjoy under the British flag. Lorchas, 
owned by Chinese, like Machow-Wong, and manned 
by the ofF-scourings of the Chinese coast, or by es- 
caped European or American convicts, infested, and, 
by the confession of our ambassador at Pekui, still 
infest, every harbour and river of the empire. 

The lorcha Arrow belonged to this class of 
vessels. Her owner was a certam Eong-Aming of 
Hong-Kong; her crew, with the exception of the 
master, were all Chinese; she had been notoriously 
engaged on several occasions in piratical undertak- 
ings ; and the notice of the Chinese government ap- 
pears for some time to have been directed to her. 
On the 8th of October 185 6, J she was boarded by 
order of Commissioner Yeh, in the Canton river: 
her crew, to the number of twelve, were taken out 
of her, mth the exception of the English master, 
who was not on board; and her flag was said (though 
this was invariably denied by the Chinese) to have 
been hauled down. On the remonstrance of Mr. 
Parkes, our consul at Canton, nine of the twelve 

-"' Opium was still prohibited both by Chinese law and by the 
treaty of Nankin, Its importation was not legalised till 1859. 

t Correspondence respecting Eegistration of Vessels at Hong-Kong, 
1857, p. 7. 

"^ Proof of the following statements will be found in Parliamentary 
Papers relating to proceedings of Her Majesty's naval forces at Can- 
ton, pp. 1-30. 



364 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

prisoners were at once restored; the remainder were 
detained on the ground of their having been by their 
own confession engaged in piracy in the previous 
month. But Mr. Parkes, by order of Sir John Bow- 
ring, insisted on the immediate restoration of the 
three pirates, and also on a formal apology from 
Commissioner Yeh. This was refused, on the ground 
that the lorcha in question was Chinese built, that 
both her owner and her crew were Chinese subjects,* 
and that the non-piratical portion of her crew had 
been at once restored. 

Ultimately the whole crew were restored ; but as 
the apology was still refused. Sir John Bowring, in 
his extreme sensitiveness for British honour, autho- 
rised the admiral on the station, Sir Michael Seymour, 
to proceed to extremities without delay. Hostihties 
began within a week of the alleged outrage. No for- 
mal declaration of war against the Chinese Empire 
was made ; but an imperial junk (or what was thought 
to be so, but in reality a private trading vessel) was 
seized, by way of reprisals. The apology being still 
withheld, operations were at once undertaken against 
the city of Canton, and by the end of the year the 
forts commanding the city were occupied. 

Such was the miserable quarrel in which the se- 
cond China war originated. Our cause Avas so con- 
temptible and, when carefully examined, so iniquitous, 

* It will be borne in mind that the Chinese residents at Hong-Kong 
■were not naturalised as British subjects. Therefore when they came 
into Chinese waters, it was clear that then at least they fell under Chi- 
nese jurisdiction. There is yet another feature in the case. " It ap- 
pears" (I quote Sir J. Bowring) " that the Arrow had no right to hoist 
the British flag ; the license to do so expired on the 21th of September^ 
from which period she has not heen entitled to protection'''' (Proceedings 
at Canton, p. 10). This consideration, however, was not allowed to 
weigh. 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 365 

that it is impossible not to search elsewhere for the 
real motives. And the search will neither be long 
nor difficult. We find these motives in the instruc- 
tions which were given to Lord Elgin on his mission 
to China in 1857. "Although," writes Lord Claren- 
don, " since the conclusion of the treaty of ISTankm 
the trade of foreign nations with Chma has been 
greatly extended, yet even in its present state it falls 
far short of what might reasonably be expected under 
an improved system of communication with the Chi- 
nese people." Lord Elgin was therefore mstructed 
to press his demand (which it was well laiown would 
not be granted) of reparation for an imaginary out- 
rage, as a stepping-stone for obtaining, by force of 
arms, "increased facilities for commerce, access to 
cities on the great rivers, as well as to Chapoo and 
other forts on the coast, and also for permission for 
Chinese vessels to resort to Hong-Kong for purposes 
of trade, from all parts of the empire without dis- 
tinction."* 

In truth the hopes which fifteen years before had 
been entertained by our Government and our mer- 
cantile classes as to the results of the opium war had 
been miserably disappointed. Sir H. Pottinger, on 
his return from China in 1842, received a sort of 
ovation from the great towns of Lancashire ; and in 
one of his speeches at Manchester he told them that 
"he had opened up a new world to their trade, so 
vast that all the mills in Lancashire could not make 
stocking - stuff sufficient for one of its provinces." 
Let us see how far these magnificent visions were 
realised. 

The value of the exports of British manufactures to 

"• Correspondence relative to Lord Elgin's Mission, 1858, pp. 3, 4. 



366 • ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

China in the years 1835 and 1836 was 1,074,000/. and 
1,326,000/. respectively; in 1843 it was 1,456,000/. 
In 1844 and 1845 Sir H. Pottinp-er's extravao^ant 
promises had produced their full effect on our cotton- 
spinners ; and we find the exports reaching the sum 
of 2,305,000/. and 2,394,000/. But mth this amount 
the markets were so glutted that our goods were 
in 1846 sold in China for twenty per cent below 
their cost price. In 1850 our exports had fallen to 
1,574,000/. In 1854 they stood at 1,000,716/.; that 
is to say, they were considerably less than in 1835.* 
Mr. Mitchell, in his very interesting memorandum 
on the China trade, addressed to Sir C. Bonham in 
1852, discusses in detail, and with great clearness, the 
causes to which this result is due. It is not due 
to protective duties ; for by the confession of all our 
merchants in China, the Chinese tariff, even before 
the opium war, was far less restrictive than our own 
is now. The duties levied upon British imports were 
insignificant compared with those levied upon Chinese 
produce at Liverpool or London. The real cause 
according to Mr. Mitchell, and most other competent 
observers here agree with him, is the untiring energy 
of the Chinese; the moderate amount of food at which 
that energy is maintained in full vigour; and the ad- 
mirable economy of time and labour which, in spite 
of the absence of machinery, is maintained in their 
manufactures. 

"During ten years," continues Mr. Mitchell, "of uninter- 
rupted residence in this country, in three separate provinces, and 
after a most careful observation of the very fact I am now about 

■"• Memorandum of Mr. Mitchell, contained in Correspondence re- 
lative to Lord Elgin's Mission, pp. 243-251. I refer also to Mr. Cob- 
den's speech in the House of Commons, May 31, 1864. 



ENGLAND AXD CHINA. • 367 

to enlarge upon, I can safely aver that, with the exception of our 
own domestics, I have never yet seen a Chinaman vrearing a gar- 
ment of our long-cloth who had to get his daily bread by his daily 
labour. Xo working Chinaman can aiford to put on a new coat 
which shall not last him at least three years, and stand the wear 
and tear of the roughest di'udgery during that period. Xow a 
garment of that description must contain at least three times the 
weight of raw cotton which we put into the heaviest goods we 
export to China. No doubt we could supply this country with 
goods as heavy; but whether we could do so as cheaply as they 
can produce them for themselves, will presently appear. 

"The best mode of illustrating the question will be by a 
single example taken fi'om the province with which I am best 
acquainted, that of Fuh-kien; and I would beg to direct the 
particular attention of the Board of Trade to the beautiful and 
simple economy of it; an economy which renders the system 
literally impregnable against all the assaults of competition. It 
is of course understood that the different provinces of CMna yield 
different products according to their respective soils and climate, 
and that the trade of the country with itself consists chiefly in 
the interchange of those productions. The Northern Provinces 
yield cotton, amongst other products, in gTeat abundance. The 
Southern, rice, sugar, fruits, drugs, dyes, and teas. Now the 
Fuh-kien farmer, among his other crops, raises a certain propor- 
tion of sugar. This he disposes of in the spring to a trader at 
the nearest sea-port, who ships it to Tien-tsin, or some other 
northern port, during the southerly monsoon, undertaMng to pay 
the farmer for it, part in money and part in northern cotton, 
when his junk retm^ns, say m four to six months. In the auturon 
the farmer receives his returns, one portion of which consists of 
cotton, which he works up as follows: "When the harvest is 
gathered, all hands in the farm-house, young and old together, 
turn to carding, spinning, and weaving this cotton ; and out of 
this homespun stuff, a heavy and dui^able material, adapted to the 
rough handling it has to go through for two or three years, they 
clothe themselves, and the sm'plus they carry to the nearest town, 
where the shopkeeper buys it for the use of the population of the 
towns and the boat-people on the rivers. Of this homespun stuff 
nine out of every ten human beings in this countiy are clothed ; 
the manufacture varying in quality fi'om the coarsest dungam to 
the finest nanking, aU produced ui the farm-houses, and costiag 



368 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

the producer literally nothing beyond the value of the raw mate- 
rial, or rather of the sugar which he exchanged for it, the produce 
of his own husbandry. The Fuh-kien farmer is thus not merely 
a farmer, but an agriculturist and manufacturer in one. He 
produces this cloth literally for nothing beyond the cost of the 
raw material; he produces it, as has been shown, under his own 
roof-tree, by the hands of his women and farm-servants ; it costs 
neither extra labour nor extra time. He keeps his domestics 
spinning and weaving while his crops are growing, and after they 
are harvested, during rainy weather, when out-door labour cannot 

be pursued In 1844 I sent musters of this native 

cloth of every quality home to England; and my correspondents 
assured me they could not produce it in Manchester at the rates 
quoted, much less lay it down here. The unceasing industry 
of this people is their substitute for steam-power; and, coupled 
with their swarming numbers, is more than a match for it." 

"We bring the Chinese," Mr. Mitchell goes on to say, 
" nothing that is really popular amongst them, except our opium. 
Opium is the ' open sesame ' to their stony hearts, and woe betide 
our trade the day we meddle with it, to its injury. As fast as 
the Company will produce opium, the Chinese will consume it." 

In the face of evidence of such undeniable weight, 
and there are many other witnesses of equal com- 
petence to the same effect, the British Government 
resolved to make one more attempt to force the 
China market, and thereby "render the industrious 
classes, who produce British commodities, happy and 
prosperous at home." * Of the three hundred mil- 
lions of peaceable men upon whom war was to be 
made for the purpose of making thirty millions 
happy, little was said or thought. War, or at least 
a threatening policy, of which war was the infallible 
consequence, was resolved upon; each trifling insult, 
each petty grievance which the humblest Chinese 
official might have inflicted, with or without cause, 
upon the humblest merchant's clerk, was carefully 

* Lord Palmerston's speech, May 31, 1864. 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 369 

treasured up ;* the convenient time having arrived, 
the first of such grievances that came to hand was 
chosen; and in 1857 we went to war with the Chinese 
empire to avenge the sufferings of a piratical schooner. 

The incidents of the war are well enough known. 
The troops sent out with Lord Elgin in 1857 were 
diverted from their purpose during that year in con- 
sequence of the Indian mutiny. But in December 
operations were resumed. By the first of January 
1858, Canton was taken. The fleet in the spring of 
that year sailed northwards and captured the forts of 
the Peiho. In July the treaty of Tien-tsin was 
signed. In the autumn of that year the details of 
the revised tariff were arranged ; and Lord Elgin 
early in 1859 returned to England, having arranged 
that the ratification of the treaty should take place 
at Pekin in June. Mr. Bruce was instructed to go 
to Tien-tsin in a British man-of-war, and thence to 
proceed to Pekin for this purpose. 

The Chinese commissioners with whom he was 
to transact the business met him at Shanghae at the 
end of May, and requested him to discuss with them 
there several points of importance connected Avith the 
treaty. Mr. Bruce, convinced that they were merely 
bent on gainmg time, refused them an interview, and 
23ushed on to Takoo, at the mouth of the Peiho river, 
without them, accompanied by the French ambassa- 
dor, M. de Bourboulon. The consequence was, that 
he found there no one to receive him, except some 
local militia, who informed him that the river was 

'^' A special Blue-book was issued in 1857, entitled "Insults in 
China." It contains all the small annoyances which EngHshmen in 
China endured (omitting those which they inflicted) from 1842 to 
1856. 

BB 



370 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

blocked up to prevent the entrance of the rebels. 
Mr. Bruce had received previous intimation while at 
Shanghae that the river had been strongly fortified, 
and had taken v/ith him a battalion of marines and a 
company of engineers. It was resolved to force the 
passage of the river. Just as operations for this pur- 
pose were being commenced by Admiral Hope, a 
despatch reached Mr. Bruce from the governor of 
the province, informing him that preparations had 
been made to receive him at another mouth of the 
river, ten miles to the north, Peh-tang, from which 
arrangements would be made for his journey to the 
capital. Utterly disregarding this message, from the 
conviction that it was merely a dishonest evasion, 
Mr. Bruce ordered our forces up the river. They 
met with a severe repulse from the Takoo forts, 
armed, it was said, with rifled cannon, and manned 
by Tartar troops, who had at last learned their trade. 
Aggressors though we undoubtedly were, since it 
had been no stipulation of the treaty of 1858 that we 
should claim the Peiho route to the capital, we chose 
to consider this repulse as a fresh declaration of war ; 
and in 1860 Lord Elgin was again sent out to China, 
accompanied by Baron Gros as the representative of 
France. In August the Takoo forts were captured. 
In October, in retaliation of the violation of a flag of 
truce and imprisonment of British subjects by the 
Tartar general, the Summer Palace of the emperor, 
the chef-d'oeuvre of Chinese architecture, was burnt 
and plundered by the Anglo-French troops ; and on 
the 21st of October the treaty of Tien-tsm was rati- 
fied, with additional pecuniary indemnities. 

The chief clauses of the treaty of Tien-tsin were : 
Confirmation of the Nankin treaty of 1842. 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 371 

Rio'ht of residence for im ambassador at Pekin. 

o 

Opening of five additional ports on the sea- coast. 

Opening of the Yang-tse river as soon as the 
suppression of the rebellion admitted. Three places 
on this river were to be opened : one of them the 
important city of Han-kow. 

Exterritoriality : 

" British subjects who may commit any crime in China shall 
be tried and punished by the consul, or other public functionary 
authorised thereto, according to the laws of Great Britain." " A 
British subject having reason to complain of a Chinese must pro- 
ceed to the consulate and state his grievance. The consul will 
inquire into the merits of his case, and will do his utmost to 
arrange it amicably. In like manner, if a Chinese have reason to 
complain of a British subject, the consul shall no less listen to 
his complaint, and endeavour to settle it in a friendly manner" 
(Articles xvi. xvii.). 

The transit duties imposed on produce as it passed 
from one province into another were all to be com- 
muted for one fixed payment, calculated at the rate 
of two and a h?Jf per cent ad valorem. (As the go- 
vernment of each province in China is dependent on 
these duties, this provision was certain to introduce 
terrible confusion.) 

The introduction of opium at a fixed duty was 
legalised. The Chinese earnestly pressed that the 
rate might be fixed at twenty per cent ; but on the 
great principle of defending this bulwark of Indian 
finance Lord Elgin was firm ; and it was decided 
that in no case should the duty on opium exceed 
ten per cent. 

Finally, an indemnity of 4,000,000 taels was to 
be paid by the province of Canton for having given 
Great Britain the trouble and expense of the war. 
From the Imperial Government nothing was extorted. 



372 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

" Every thing we saw," said Lord Elgin, " indicated 
the penury of the treasury. We came to the con- 
clusion, that on practical grounds, and apart from 
certain considerations of morality and justice^ which 
mighty perhaps^ he urged on behalf of the Chinese Go- 
vernment^ it would be unwise to drive it to despair, 
and perhaps to extreme measures of resistance." 

Such, then, has been the policy of England to- 
wards China during the last thirty years. We have 
made no extensive territorial aggression as yet : ex- 
cept the island of Hong-Kong, and the land hired at 
the treaty - ports, we hold, whether temporarily or 
permanently, no land in China. But there are not 
wanting publicists who, with many a hypocritical 
affectation of regret, prepare the public mind for 
what they profess to regard as the involuntary des- 
tiny of England : and the breaches of our alleged 
neutrality in the recent rebellion; the pretension to 
defend an area of thirty miles radius from Shanghae ; 
and the ominous hints we now and then receive about 
the " Council of Kent-holders" in that city, who ap- 
pear disposed to regard themselves as constituting a 
sort of municipal government, are aggressive indica- 
tions which it is highly important should not pass 
unnoticed. But the injuries we have inflicted on 
China are other than territorial. If it is ruinous to 
the self-respect, and therefore to the public order and 
wellbeing, of a nation, to have foreign settlements 
forcibly implanted in its midst, it is even more fatal 
and pernicious that its own internal legislation, whe- 
ther criminal or financial, should be at the mercy 
of a foreign Power. If it is deeply wounding to the 
self-respect of Spain that we should occupy Gibraltar, 
how far more humiliating, how incomparably more 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 373 

fatal to its interests, how far more disgraceful to our 
honour, were we to assume the pretension of regu- 
latino: its tariff for the sole benefit of Enoiish mer- 
chants and English labourers ! How small the differ- 
ence between submitting to the rule of a foreign 
conqueror and submitting to the monstrous claim of 
exterritoriality, by which a British subject who had 
robbed or murdered a Spaniard in a Spanish port 
should assert his right to be tried not by Spanish 
but by British law, and by a British judge ! Yet 
forcible regulation of the commercial tariffs, and 
forcible assertion of the British criminal law in cases 
of injuries committed by British residents or sailors 
on Chinese subjects, have been two cardinal prin- 
ciples of our Chinese policy. 

There is one feature of the last Chinese war of 
which nothino; has been said. It was clistinsruished 
from the opium war by the fact that in it we united 
our arms with those of France. Their pretext for 
interfering was the death of a Catholic missionary, 
M. Chapdelaine, who, in direct contradiction to the 
express law of the country, had been disseminating 
his doctrines in the pro^dnce of Quang-si, and was 
executed according to law in February 1856. The 
admiration we may feel for his courage must not 
blind us to the fact that he was acting in plain de- 
fiance of constituted authority, and that the conse- 
quences were those of which he had a clear know- 
ledge beforehand. Our own missionaries have been 
less adventurous ; yet the result of their teaching has 
not been less injurious. Hung-tse-tsuen, the leader 
of the great rebelhon, which collapsed with his death 
last summer at the capture of Nankin, based his re- 
ligious and political system on a series of Protestant 



374 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

tracts written by a convert of Dr. Milne.* The sys- 
tem was a travesty of Christianity, thoroughly pene- 
trated with the animosities and the combative spirit of 
Jewish history. Of course neither the writer of the 
tracts nor his teacher are responsible for the extra- 
vagant and destructive excesses of Hung-tse-tsuen ; 
but the whole history is a strong and terrible illus- 
tration of the extreme danger of importing and dis- 
seminating broadcast doctrines wholly new and in one 
sense profoundly revolutionary, without the slightest 
guarantee that they would be rightly interpreted. 



II. 

CHINESE CIVILISATION AND HISTORY. 

To regenerate the Oriental policy of Western 
nations is one of the most essential applications of 
that system of political and social life and thought 
to which Auguste Comte has given the name of 
Positivism. The political spirit of the system is 
best indicated in that which is its highest aim, the 
subordination, namely, of politics to morality. It is 
an aim which applies to every department of prac- 
tical life, domestic, national, European, or cosmo- 
politan. But m each case, before a wise course of 
action can be systematically pursued, scientific know- 
ledge, that is to say, a theory sufficiently real, definite, 
and coherent to admit of something like foresight, 
is necessary. Savoir^ pour prevoir^ ajin de pourvoir. 
Wise empirical instmct, in the absence of definite 
principle, has no doubt occasionally led statesmen of 
the highest order to choose the right course, even 

* See Brine's Taeping Rebellion, p. QQ. 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 375 

when it ran counter to the public opinion of their 
time. But from the empirical instincts of average 
statesmen, guided mainly by the pressure of domi- 
nant interests and parties, nothing of the kind is to 
be hoped. It is on the current of contemporary opi- 
nion, ignorant or enlightened, ignoble or honourable 
as it may be, that the national policy will depend. 
To modify and renovate the opinion of Europe, to 
implant in it strong, sound, and coherent convictions 
upon all public questions, is therefore the sole hope of 
those who would regenerate our policy. 

The policy which for the last thirty years England 
and other Western Powers have been pursuing m China 
is a very obvious exemplification of this truth. We 
have acted in profound ignorance, and with the con- 
tempt that springs from ignorance, of the civihsation 
with which we have had to deal. Our policy has 
therefore, as might have been foreseen, been blind, 
brutal, and unjust. Two motives, acting with very 
unequal degrees of strength, have animated it, to the 
exclusion of all others ; the desire for gain, and the 
hope of religious proselytism. Comparing English ac- 
tion in China with Spanish action three centuries ago 
ih Mexico and Peru, it is by no means clear that 
the advantage is on our side. Nothing so shameless 
as the opium war is to be found in S]3anish history. 
The chief difference between the two cases is that 
the second of the two motives I have mentioned, the 
spirit of religious proselytism, has, from the obvious 
weakenino; of theolog^ical belief at home, acted in our 
case very much less powerfully than in theirs. Spa- 
nish merchants and soldiers were for the most part 
sincere in their wish to save the souls of those whom 
they spoliated. In our case the religious motive has 



376 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

been confined to a small though not unimportant sec- 
tion ; and its worst effect has been that it has stopped 
the mouths of men who would have protested against 
the trade in opium as they protested fifty years ago 
against the trade in slaves, but for the secret hope 
that it might be ''opening a door" for the propaga- 
tion of their own religious belief.* 

On the principle, then, that if a wiser and nobler 
course of policy is to be inaugurated in China, it is 
essential to have truer views of what Chinese civili- 
sation really is, and of the position which it occupies 
relatively to the civilisation of the West, the follow- 
ing pages are offered as a contribution towards this 
object, f 

It has been so often repeated as to have become 
almost a truism, that Chinese civilisation is at a stand- 
still, and that it has remained stagnant for some twenty 
or thirty centuries. Yet in this truism there has al- 
ways lain a paradox. To the philosophic student of 
history the hypothesis of so complex a social system 
rising up in so remote a period, without apparent link 
of connection either to the world around it or before 

it, has always been difiicult, if not incredible. But a 

« 

* Some Protestant missionaries have stood out as noble exceptions, 
as e. g. Mr. Medhurst ; but the greater number have been silenced by 
considerations such as those stated above. Mr. Cobbold, one of our 
missionaries, reveals incautiously the arcana imperii in this matter. 
" The Archbishop of Canterbury," he says, " gave wise counsel to the 
newly - appointed diocesan of Hong-Kong not to preach a crusade 
against the opium traffic." See his Life in China, p. 111. 

j- The mass of material available for this purpose is very great. 
There are fourteen quarto volumes of Jesuit memoirs, full of accurate 
and detailed information; of these I have consulted Duhalde and 
Amiot. These and the work on China by Pauthier ; his translation of 
Confucius and Mencius ; the Melanges Asiatiques of Remusat ; above all 
the Civilisation Chinoise of Pierre Lafitte, in which the subject is treated 
from the Positivist point of view, have been my chief authorities. 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 377 

brief glance at the history of China, as based on docu- 
ments now known to be authentic, shows the ordinary 
view, whether plausible or paradoxical,' to be alto- 
gether groundless. The records of Chinese authority 
accepted by scholars like Eemusat, Pauthier, and 
Stanislas Julien, extend, with more or less detail and 
precision, over a period of about 4000 years. With 
the exception of two long periods of anarchy, these 
records form an almost continuous narrative of poli- 
tical, social, and material progress. At the era when 
Rome was founded, and the first Greek republics 
were struggling into life, it seems clear that Chinese 
civilisation had not advanced south of the Hoang-ho, 
and was limited to the area of the existing provinces 
of Chan-si and Chin-si. Between that time and the 
present it has extended north, south, east, and west, 
mitil at the time of Lord Macartney's embassy it co- 
vered more than a million of square miles ; and if we 
include the whole reo^ion over which Kien-Louno; 
then claimed feudal authority, the empire of China 
at the close of the last century extended from the 
mouth of the great river of Mantchouria to the nor- 
thern slopes of the Himalayan Mountains. Prior to 
the brief and meagre records of those primitive cen- 
turies, we find traditions of an energetic people 
emerging from barbarism by the usual slow and 
painful struggles. We find grateful memories of 
heroes and discoverers who freed their fellow-men 
from the dangers of the flood or forest, and taught 
them the first simple arts of sedentary life. We hear 
of the first tamer of animals, the first inventor of the 
plough, the first musician, the lawgiver who founded 
the institution of marriage and the rites of worship, 
the wise men who fixed the length of the year, and 



378 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

who taught rules for the measurement of the soil. 
Gradually down the course of the Hoang-ho, and in 
the country between it and the Yang-tse, this nascent 
civilisation extended. Political unity there was none. 
There was a common race, a common language, and 
something like community of worship ; but politically, 
what we find in the time of Confucius, and even two 
or three centuries later, is a collection of small prin- 
cipalities, recognising more or less willingly the no- 
minal and honorary supremacy of a dominant family. 
In the third century B.C., what may be called, for 
want of a more appropriate term, the feudal system 
of China, gave place to the vigorous government of 
Thsin-chi, who may be considered as the real founder 
of the Chinese empire. Not only did he centrahse 
the government of the eight or nine small kingdoms 
which had previously recognised his authority, but 
a vast additional area, the whole of what is now 
Southern China was conquered, and brought for the 
first time within the pale of civilisation. To the north 
the great wall still remains as a monument of his 
power, a proof rather than an instrument of the suc- 
cess with which he contended against the inundatmg 
forces of Tartar barbarism. 

From the time of this great governor to that of 
the great rulers of the present dynasty, the object has 
been to develop and extend the resources of this im- 
mense region; and with the exception of a disas- 
trous period of anarchy between the third and the 
sixth century a.d., this object has been pursued with 
contmuous success. The reigning dynasty has fre- 
quently been changed. Thrice have Tartar families 
seized the throne of Pekin, and one of them still holds 
it ; but the effect of these dynastic changes upon the 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 379 

social condition of tlie empire has been comparatively 
insignificant. The conquerors, whether Mongol or 
Mantchou, have always adopted and maintained a 
ci^Tilisation, the superiority of which they fully recog- 
nised ; and the result of their usurpations has been, 
not that Tartar barbarism has inundated China, but 
that Chinese ci\aLisation has penetrated into Tartary. 

From the beginning of the twelfth century one 
of those periods of dynastic revolutions which, as ^vill 
be seen afterwards, form almost an organic part 
of the Chinese system, had set in ; and for one hun- 
dred and fifty years the vSoung djmasty divided their 
power with the Kin, a race of Mantchou or North- 
Tartary origm, who made themselves masters of 
China as far south as Nankin. But meantime a far 
more formidable power was rising among the Tartars 
of the West. The mighty Mongol was sweeping 
through Central Asia, and louring over Europe in 
a hurricane of conquest. The grandsons of Genghis 
Khan divided his vast dominions; and to the lot of 
Hou-pi-li fell those which formed the western bound- 
ary of China. He was not the man to rest contented 
with the government of barren steppes and nomad 
tribes. Before him lay the choicest and richest re- 
gions of his known world. The empu-e, as I have 
said, was divided, and his task was easy. He ofi'ered 
his dangerous assistance to the southern dynasty of 
Soung against the northern usurpers. Things fol- 
lowed in the usual course ; and by the middle of the 
thirteenth century Marco Polo, the Venetian, found 
the Youan or Mongol dynasty firmly established in 
China, from their newly -built city of Pekin to 
Canton. 

But Hou-pi-li was a conqueror of the school of 



380 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

Theodoric rather than of Attila, and was perfectly 
well aware that he and his chiefs had every thing to 
learn from those they claimed to govern. The notion 
of overthrowing the ancient and majestic structure of 
Chinese civilisation was wholly foreign to his mind; 
and his whole elFort, the military work once over, 
seems to have been spent in qualifying himself for 
the high office of protecting and ennobling it. He 
at once called to his court three of the most eminent 
natives of the literary class, and intrusted them with 
the highest offices of government, especially with 
those relating to industry and education. With the 
help of one of these, Yao-chow, he became himself a 
most laborious student of the traditions and religion 
of the empire, and of the teaching of its great mo- 
ralists. At the same time he gave v/illing welcome 
to astronomers and men of science from India and 
Arabia. He himself professed the creed of his family 
and nation; that is to say, the Thibetian or Lamaistic 
form of Buddhism; but how little this faith inter- 
fered ^Yith his acceptance of the ancient and dominant 
religion of China, of what may be called, though it is 
far older than Confucius, Confucianism, is shown by 
his adoption of its fundamental institution, the wor- 
ship of ancestors. A magnificent temple was built 
by his order at Pekin, where with the strictest 
forms observed by the humblest of his subjects, he 
bowed down in worship to the father of the mighty 
Genghis, the founder of his race. He reestablished, 
at the request of the literate class, the ancient col- 
leges and the system of appointment to offices by 
examinations; that singular yet effective check upon 
despotism, by which it is placed in the power of the 
humblest citizen in a provincial town to rise to the 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 381 

highest position in the state. He reorganised the 
tribunal of historians, to which the conscious con- 
tinuity of Chinese civilisation is in a great measure 
due. The temples of Confucius were restored to 
their full honour; and the names of recent teachers 
were added to the calendar of saints and sages, who, 
as disciples of Confucius, are held up to the venera- 
tion of posterity. 

But the Mongol dynasty held the throne of China 
only for a hundred years. Subsequent emperors dege- 
nerated from the first founder : the unwise encourage- 
ment given to Buddhist lamas excited the opposition 
of the educated and official class ; and the extreme 
feebleness of the emperor Chun-ti coinciding, so it 
seemed, with an unusual succession of earthquakes 
and famines (and the latter of these, at least, were 
doubtless dependent more or less upon misgovern- 
ment), made it clear to men that Heaven was pre- 
paring the advent of a new dynasty. Pirates ap- 
peared along the coasts; insurrections broke out in 
the north and south ; for a long time anarchy, at the 
least as extensive as that which we have seen during 
the last fifteen years, reigned through the empire. 
At length, from a Buddhist convent in one of the 
southern provinces, there issued the man appointed 
by Heaven to restore peace. Tchou, best known in 
Europe by the name of Houng-wou, the founder of 
the Ming dynasty, was the son of a peasant, and rose 
to fame and power by his own native energy and 
wisdom. He joined one of the rebel bands, became 
their chief, passed the Yang-tse river, took possession 
of the important province of Kiang-nan, and estab- 
lished his court in the ancient capital of Pekm. It 
was not, however, till after several years, when his 



382 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

superiority over the Mongol dynasty and over the 
other rebel leaders became palpable to every one, 
that he believed himself entitled to assume the name 
of emperor. His generals and the chief civil autho- 
rities represented to him that the voice of the nation, 
the course of events, the will of Heaven, had mani- 
festly declared upon his side. Those who have 
shaken off the weak superstition, once so prevalent, 
as to Cromwell's hypocrisy, will not be inclined to 
cavil at his answer : " Since Heaven and men will 
have it so, I yield," he replied; and he then solemnly 
declared, before Heaven and Earth, that not by am- 
bition nor from any personal motive did he assume 
this office, but in obedience to the will of Heaven, 
whose order had been manifested by the voice of the 
people, and transmitted to him by the officers and 
statesmen of the empire. Accordingly, in the first 
month of the year 1368 he offered, as son of Heaven, 
the ancient imperial sacrifice in the temple of Heaven 
at Pekin. He reigned thirty years. The records of 
his administration, edited by the Tribunal of Annal- 
ists more than two centuries afterwards, under the 
critical eye of the Mantchou dynasty which succeeded 
him, show us a wise, benevolent, and energetic go- 
vernor, penetrated with the intensest spirit of Chinese 
nationality, and animated by strong sympathies with 
the mass of the labouring population, from whom he 
sprung. On one occasion, after performing the usual 
sacrifice of the winter solstice, he is reported to have 
taken his son into the fields, and pointing to the 
groups of hard-working labourers whom they saw 
there : " These m&n," he said, " are now putting their 
seed into the earth, trusting that it will bear fruit in 
season. It is for us, my son, that these poor men 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 383 

are working : they wear themselves out with toil, and 
have themselves hardly food enough to repair the 
strength of their bodies : we reap the fruits of their 
labours. Our fathers were of these men. I have 
seen them dropping their sweat upon the fields, and 
I know what they have to bear. Had I had bodily 
strength enough, I should be now labouring like 
them, and you would be a peasant's son. Heaven 
has willed otherwise ; but never forget our former 
station; and let the memory of it hinder you from 
looking down on those whose lives are destined to 
be spent in hard toil." 

As a general he was fully successful. He re- 
stored the prestige of the Chinese arms ; and after 
having driven the Mongols from China, he restored 
the feudal authority of China over the Mongol prin- 
cipalities outside the empire. His internal adminis- 
tration was distinguished by rigorous economy, by 
remission of all needless taxation, and by zealous 
support of the national religion. Every rite, every 
sacrifice that had been abolished or neglected by the 
later Mongols he carefully restored. The Buddhist 
lamas, who had multiplied their indolent convents 
to mischievous excess, were tolerated as before, but 
no longer patronised and encouraged ; while the Con- 
fucians, or literate class, were endowed and fostered. 
Like many of the former emperors, he established 
institutions which Western pride has often - thought 
peculiar to Christendom: hospitals for the sick and 
orphans; almshouses for old men without families to 
support them. Public libraries were also set up in 
the capital cities of each province. The waste lands 
belonging to the state were brought into cultivation, 
the peasantry of the neighbourhood being allowed to 



384 EXGLAND AND CHINA. 

hold them rent-free for a certain number of years. 
A general survey and census of the empire was made, 
and the laws were more or less completely codified. 

His will, published in every province of the em- 
pire four years before his death, narrates the results 
of his life with becoming dignity : 

"It is now long since I received the order of Heaven to 
govern men: I have reigned for thirty-one years. I have done all 
in my power not to fail in my duty. I have brought peace into 
the empke, and restored its ancient glory. I have not been idle 
nor negligent, for I have always been employed either in war or 
in business of state. I have always sought the welfare of the 
people, and I think that it is satisfied of my good intentions. My 
birth was humble ; I had no virtues nor deserts ; I received the 
government without seeking it, and indeed without desiring it. 
I put the wise emperors of past times before me as models for 
my government: I know that I have not succeeded in imitating 
them in every point, but I can truly say that I have used every 
effort to do so. I am now seventy-one years old; my strength 
grows less, and I shall soon pay the debt of men : this does not 
trouble me. 

" In order to leave the empire after my death in peace and 
quietness, I choose my grandson Choung-wou for my successor. 
I have seen in him prudence and mildness; I think that he will 
rule well. He is the son of my eldest son, and therefore it is well 
that my choice should fall upon him. Let all princes and officers, 
whether military or civil, have for him the same respect as for 
me; and let all my subjects know my will. I wish my body to 
be placed in the tomb that I have prepared for it, and let nothing- 
be changed in the places round it. Let the ceremonies be such 
as were observed at the death of Wen-ti, of the Han dynasty. 
Lest the princes, my sons, should raise any disturbance, I com- 
mand each of them to stay in his own dominions, and let none 
come to the capital." 

The tradition of good government lasted for about 
a century after his death. Gradually, however, after 
that time the stock degenerated. The influences of 
unworthy favourites and of Buddhist lamas increased 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 385 

at court. The usual results of misgovernment, fa- 
mines and invasions, followed ; and the additional 
signs of comets and earthquakes were hardly needed 
to show that Heaven was withdrawing its favour 
from the dynasty of Ming. Rebellions again broke 
out in every province: the Mantchou Tartars hung 
threateningly on the northern boundary ; and during 
the reigns of three emperors, for a period of thirty 
years, the empire was again agonising, as is the case 
at the present time, and as had frequently been the 
case before, in a crisis of anarchy ; anarchy, however, 
which is always purely political, not social, in its 
nature. The Mandarins used the boldest and most 
strenuous efforts to convince their sovereign of the 
displeasure of Heaven, as manifested in the miseries 
and dangers of the empire. But things went from 
bad to worse : Li-tseu-ching, one of eight insurgent 
leaders, besieged and took Pekin; the emperor re- 
fused to survive the diso-race, and closed the Mins^ 
dynasty with his life. His ablest general, Ou-san- 
kouei, took the desperate resolution of calling in 
Tsoung-te, the chief of the Mantchou Tartars, against 
the rebels. He had lono; been waitins^ for the sum- 
mons ; and by the middle of the seventeenth century 
the new dynasty of the Tai-tsing, which still reigns, 
was firmly seated in the Chinese capital. Tsoung-te 
died at the moment of triumph. The ultimate con- 
quest of the empire was due to his brother, Amavang, 
who met with desperate resistance, both in the north- 
em and southern pro^dnces, from partisans of the old 
d}masty. Tlie struggle occupied more than ten years ; 
but with the capture of Canton, a.d. 1650, the con- 
quest was complete. 

As the date of the Mantchou conquest coincided 

cc 



386 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

with that of the entrance of the Jesuits into China^ 
we are supplied with very minute and authentic 
details from impartial observers as to the social re- 
sults of this dynastic change. And we find, as the 
previous history of China would have led us a priori 
to expect, that the Mantchous showed the same re- 
gard for Chinese civilisation as the Mongols.* The 
forced introduction of the Tartar method of dressing 
the hair was the only sign of conquest; the object 
of it being apparently to promote the assimilation of 
the two nations. In other respects the adoption of 
Chinese habits by the Tartars was complete. The fa- 
ther of Tsoung-te, who had as far back as 1618 formed 
the scheme of conquest, had sent him when a boy 
into China, and had had him thoroughly instructed 
in its language, laws, and literature ; and succeeding 
emperors governed in the same spirit. They made 
no organic change m the ancient institutions. Chi- 
nese continued to be the official language ; Confucian 
mandarins divided with Tartars the chief offices in 
the six central boards or tribunals of state at Pekin ; 
and the civil government of the provinces and towns 
of the interior was left entirely in their hands. The 
impartiahty of the examination system, the pecuhar 
institution of China, and the safeguard of its liberties, 
was rigorously upheld. During the three reigns of 
Kang-hi, Young-tching, and Kian-loung, that is to 
say from 1662 to 1796 a.d., the empire enjoyed a 
degree of prosperity and of healthy vigour to which 
few countries of the Eastern or Western world at 

'■' The care which up to the present day is taken of the tombs of 
the Ming dynasty by its conquerors and successors has been pointed 
out recently by Dr. Rennie ; who remarks also that not less respect has 
been shown to the tombs of the Jesuit missionaries. Eennie's Pekin 
and the Pelcinese. 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 387 

any period of their history can show a parallel. In- 
ternally, the increase of population and of wealth 
during this period was immense. The outlying re- 
gions of Thibet, little Bokhara, Mongolia, Mantchou- 
ria, and the Corea, were reduced to feudal dependence 
on Pekin; and thus what had always been the most 
apparent and obvious danger of Chinese civilisation, 
barbarian invasion (for the still more dangerous inva- 
sion of Western commercialism was but imperfectly 
foreseen as yet), was effectually removed. Great en- 
couragement was given to Chinese literature ; and 
the Jesuit missionaries, the most heroic and the most 
enlightened of all Christian propagandists, were mak- 
ing strenuous and partially successful efforts to in- 
troduce Western science. 

An extract from the will of Kang-hi, whose reign 
coincided nearly with that of Louis XIY., will sho^v 
at least the standard at which he aimed : we have 
the authority of such shrewd and critical observers 
as the Fathers Gaubil and Amiot for asserting that 
he did not fall far below it : 

" I the emperor, who honour Heaven, and who am charged 
with its decrees, say: from all time it has been the duty of those 
who goyern the universe to revere Heaven and to follow the ways 
of our ancestors. The true way to do this is to treat kindly those 
who come fr^om far, and to promote according to their worth those 
who are near; to give the people peace and plenty; to aim at the 
good of the world as at our own; to make our heart one with the 
heart of the world; to preserve the State from dangers before they 
come, and to meet all disturbances with wisdom. The ruler who 
works with this design from morning till night, and even during 
his sleep thinks of it, is not far from having done his duty. 

" I the emperor, who am seventy years old, and have reigned 
sixty years, owe this to the invisible help of Heaven and of Earth, 
of my Ancestors, and of the Power which rules the tillage of the 
empire; I owe it not to my weak reason. Three hundred and one 



B88 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

emperors have reigned during the last 4350 years; few have 
reigned so long as I. I cannot indeed say that I have changed 
all eyil customs and reformed men's manners; I have not brought 
plenty into every family, nor satisfied each man's needs; and 
therefore I cannot compare myself to the wise rulers of the 
three first dynasties. Yet I can say that during so long a reign 
I have had no other end than to bring peace into the empire, to 
make my people happy, each in his condition. For this I have 
toiled, and it has worn out the strength of my mind and body. 

" Our dynasty gained the empire not by spoliation, though we 
might have done it; but by the wish of the great men and of the 
whole nation. They performed the faneral rites of the last em- 
peror of the Ming in due custom. It is Heaven who fixes the 
destiny of dynasties: if it has decreed them a long life, nothing 

can obstruct their course During my life I have put 

no one to death without due cause. I have not spent the trea- 
sures of the empire uselessly. I have collected only the tribute 
necessary for the support of the army and to provide against 
famine. When I travelled through the empire, I have not allowed 
the houses where I stayed to be hung with silk; and what I have 
spent yearly in these journeys amounts not to the hundredth part 
of what has been spent each year in making and repairing the 

dikes of rivers Young-tching, the fourth of my sons, 

is a man of rare worth. He inherits my character, and will, I 
doubt not, be able to bear the burden of the empire. I choose 
bim for my successor. Let this edict be published in every pro- 
yince, so that all may know it." 

Hardly less illustrious was the grandson of Kang- 
M, Kien-loung, who reigned from 1735 to 1796. 
"His reign," says Abel Eemusat, ''brought addi- 
tional splendour to the Mantchou dynasty. His 
political views were perhaps less broad than those 
of Kang-hi ; but his character was firm, his intellect 
penetrating ; he was gifted with extraordinary energy, 
and he was singularly upright in his dealings. He 
loved his people as a Chinese sovereign should love 
them; that is, he governed them with justice, and 
maintained peace and plenty among his subjects. 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 389 

Six times in the course of his reign he visited the 
southern provinces, each time with some useful 
object, whether to construct dikes against marine 
inundations, or to punish misgovernment and em- 
bezzlement among his officers. He repaired the 
channels of the Hoang-ho and the Yang-tse. Five 
times, either on his mother's birthday or his own, he 
remitted the taxes payable in silver ; ^yq times those 
payable in kind; besides other partial remissions in 
various provinces to meet occasional distress from 
bad harvests or from inundations." In war, so far as 
war was needed, he was successful. The work of 
consolidating Chinese authority among the Tartar 
tribes outside the frontiers was carried on prosper- 
ously. Two generations afterwards. Hue and Gabet 
give indisputable proof of the profound respect with 
which Tartar chiefs regard the Chinese empire, even 
when they are resisting the excesses of its authority. 
Kien-loung gave every encouragement to literature, 
and was himself a successful author both in the 
Mantchou and Chinese languages. 

The history of the Mantchou government during 
the present century is more obscure, because, o^ving 
to the expulsion or suppression of the Jesuits, we 
have been deprived to a great extent of their invalu- 
able testimony. It is the practice of the Chinese not 
to publish the history of their emperors until the 
time of the succeeding dynasty, although the manu- 
scripts of the contemporary annalists are most scru- 
pulously preserved. It is, however, certain that Kia- 
king and his successors of the present century have 
been men of inferior worth ; that misgovernment and 
corruption have prevailed extensively, as has been so 
frequently the case before ; and that for several years 



390 englajS'D and china. 

previous to Lord Napier's aggressive mission formid- 
able rebellions had broken out in various provinces. 
Of this temporary crisis of anarchy the most has 
been made. It is the fashion with aggressive states- 
men, whether English or Russian, when their eye is 
directed to an object of future spoliation, to portray 
it as suffering from some deep-seated political disease, 
for which, as they would persuade their philanthropic 
countrymen, annexation is the only cure. But Chinese 
history proves in the plainest and most unmistakable 
way that the " sick man" left to himself has always 
possessed an ample supply of recuperative energy. 

The rapid and cursory review that has been here 
taken is sufficient to convince us how destitute of 
foundation is the common behef so readily accepted 
by statesmen, merchants, and editors, that the Chinese 
empire is in a state of effete and hopeless decay. On 
the one hand it is certain that during the whole of 
the last century the vitality and vigour of this poli- 
tical system was equal, if not superior, to that of any 
period of its history during the last four thousand 
years : and on the other hand it is no less certain 
that the feebleness of government and the consequent 
anarchy vv^hich have recently prevailed, are not ex- 
ceptional in Chinese history. Crises similar in kind 
and worse in degree and in duration have occurred 
before, at intervals of two or three centuries. From 
these crises the inherent vitality of the social or- 
ganism has always been sufficient to bring complete 
recovery. Sometimes the renovating force has come 
from an insurgent army; sometimes from an outly- 
ing Tartar tribe, whether independent or bound by 
vassal ties, yet always of kindred blood. In either 
case the substantial result has been the same. The 



ENGLAND AXD CHINA. 391 

insurgent leader or Tartar chief has always looked 
upon himself and his d}TLasty, not as the conquerors 
of a subject pro^dnce, imposmg on it new laws, ex- 
acting arbitrary tribute, and trampling on its self- 
respect with the reckless avarice of a commercial cor- 
poration or the ignoble pride of a dominant race; 
but as delegates of the supreme Heaven, called to the 
highest and hardest task that can fall to the lot of 
man, to direct the destinies of the great empire in a 
spirit of reverence for her ancient religion and laws, 
and to secure the peace and welfare of her people. 
The great men of the present dynasty have fully main- 
tained this standard. There is no reason whatever 
to suppose that future djmasties would fall below it. 

As in political power and \dgour, so with regard 
to arts, industry, and intellectual enlightenment, the 
stationary theory of Chinese civilisation is altogether 
refuted by the facts. Continual additions have been 
made to the inheritance of the past. The invention 
of paper took place in the second century a.d., that 
is to say, between 600 and 700 years after the death 
of Confucius ; that of printing in the ninth century. 
The tenth centur}", in which the intellectual activities 
of Western Europe were somewhat dormant, was dis- 
tinguished in China by extraordinary literary deve- 
lopment ; but some of the best histories, fictions, and 
dramas, as well as encyclopaedias, dictionaries, and 
other works of erudition, have been written during 
the two last dvnasties.* 

Progress in the general diffusion of knowledge 

" Chinese literature is particularly rich in encjclopeedias, both of a 
special or professional, and of a general kind. Among the latter, 
that of Ma-touan-lin is the most famous. This author flourished in 
the thirteenth century. His work consists of 2-4 sections divided into 
348 books. The titles of the former are worth giving, as illustrating 



392 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

and enlightenment is not less certain. The estab- 
lishment, in the ninth century a.d., of the system 
by which offices of state were thrown open to free 
competition by literary examination, a system the 
merits and demerits of which need not be discussed 
here, has given a greater stimulus to study than has 
ever been applied in any European country. And in 
no European country, previous to the beginning of 
the present century, was there so large a proportion 
of the population able to read and write. 

" All parents," says Captain Brine, " even those belonging to 



the concrete and practical direction of the Chinese mind. The list is 
taken from the Melanges Asiatiques of A. Kemusat, vol. ii. 

1. Division of lands, and their produce under different dynasties ; 

7 books. 

2. Currency, metallic or paper ; 2 books. 

3. Population, and its variations ; 2 books. 

4. Administration ; 2 books. 

5. Customs, excise, octrois, &c. ; 6 books. 

6. Commerce and exchange ; 2 books. 

7. Land-tax ; 1 book. 

8. State expenditure ; 5 books. 

9. Promotion and rank of magistrates ; 12 books. 

10. Studies for the State literary examinations ; 7 books. 

11. Functions of magistrates ; 21 books. 

12. Sacrifices ; 23 books. 

13. Temples of ancestors ; 15 books. 

14. Court ceremonial ; 22 books. 

15. Music ; 15 books. 

16. War ; 13 books. 

17. Punishments ; 12 books. 

18. Classical books ; 76 books. This section is of itself a sort of 

encyclopaedia of Chinese literature. 

19. Chronology and genealogy of reigning dynasties ; 10 books. 

20. Principalities dependent on the empire ; 10 books. 

21. Astronomy ; 17 books. 

22. Earthquakes, inundations, and other natural calamities; 20 

books. 

23. Geography of China ; 9 books. 

24. Geography of foreign countries ; 25 books. 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 393 

the poorest of the labouring class, deem the placing of their sons 
at school a matter of the first importance; and for this purpose I 
have known agricultural labourers and boatmen save as much as 
possible out of their small earnings from the day of their mar- 
riage, and look forward with hope to the time when the boy can 
be sent away to pick up the slight amount of learning so requisite 
for his future success in life."* 

The material progress of China in wealth and in 
population, from the earliest times of which we have 
exact record, is also obvious. The recent censuses 
exhibit an immense increase in numbers as compared 
with that taken at the beginning of the century, or 
with those of previous dynasties; and the means of 
sustaining the population seem to have increased in 
something more than an equal ratio. 

Thus, whether we look at the political power of 
China, at her national wealth, or at her intellectual 
acquisitions, we cannot but see that the common view, 
that China is in a state of decline from an arrested 
state of growth reached twenty or thirty centuries 
ago, is in every respect erroneous. We see, on the 
contrary, a slow but nearly continuous growth of this 
immense organism; interrupted indeed occasionally 
by dynastic revolutions, but invariably recovering the 
lost ground, repairing the broken chain of tradition, 
and adding fresh links. 

By what means, it may now be inquired, has this 
great social fabric been held together? Where and 
of what kind are its principles of cohesion, its vital 
forces? I have taken the dynamical point of view 

* Brine's Taeping Rebellion (1862), p. 13. He gives it as the result 
of his personal inquiries, that about one-fifth of the population, at least 
" in the thriving districts bordering upon the mouths of the great 
rivers," including women and children, would be found to read mode- 
rately. "With the boat population the proportion is still higher" 
(p. 19). 



394 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

first, as having the closest relation with the erroneous 
belief in Chinese stagnation, which it is practically 
important to remove: but it would have been more 
logical to have begun with the statical aspect of the 
subject ; to have examined the organisation, before 
we studied the function ; to have investigated Chinese 
order ^ before demonstrating Chinese ^ro^r^55. 

A few words, then, on the spiritual and temporal 
order of China. 

The centre of a nation's life, as of a man's life, i§ 
its religion. What is the religion of China? What 
is its standard of spiritual health ; its ideal of conduct, 
of duty? 

For there is a mode of religion in China, which, 
differing utterly in outward ritual and even in the 
object of adoration from our own, yet satisfies to a 
very large degree the essential meaning an^ true 
spirit of the word. Amid all the forms of worship 
which have prevailed among men, whether Fetishist 
or Polytheist, whether Catholic, Mohammedan, or 
Protestant, one instinctive purpose may be traced, 
followed out in each to various degrees of perfection. 
That purpose is to control, to regulate, to reduce 
to unity the discordant passions of man's heart, by 
impressing him with the consciousness that he is not 
his own; that he is not isolated in the universe; 
that he is indissolubly linked mth and subordinated 
to an external power; a power superior to and un- 
shaken by the conflicting desires of his own imperfect 
nature. The phases of the world's faith appear to 
the superficial observer so multitudinous and intricate, 
that to seek for the law of their formation, the com- 
mon basis on which they meet, might seem as im- 
possible as to account for the lawless phantoms of the 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 395 

madman's brain, or to follow the endless ramifications 
of thought in dreams. But attentively considered, 
while differing not only in form and in ritual, but in 
dogma, they all agree in this. Every creed, whether 
it be Indian, Greek, or Christian, so far as it is really 
and heartily believed, exercises a strong govermnent 
over the affections of the soul; checks more or less 
imperfectly the self-seeking propensities, and calls 
forth the aspiring emotions of love and reverence. 
Therefore religion, under whatever name or form, has 
always been a source, a two-fold source, of union 
amongst men. For in the first place, those of the 
same faith have been ever strongly bound together 
by a common dogma, a common object of adoration. 
Secondly, and in a still deeper sense, the unity, the 
harmony, the concentration, which it is the function 
of religion to effect in the soul, implies that the lower 
or selfish passions are subordinated by it to the higher 
or unselfish. It is a check on avarice, anger, ambition, 
and the other self-regarding instincts; which, since 
they cannot be indulged in by each man except at 
the expense of his fellows, and since no one of them 
can be called into predominant action except by for- 
cible suppression of the rest, are a source of disturb- 
ance and disunion. It develops and stimulates the 
unselfish emotions of love, reverence, and pity ; which, 
though naturally and organically weaker than the 
selfish, admit of being called into action by all men 
simultaneously, and are indeed infinitely strength- 
ened by the consciousness of common sympathy. 

Obviously, the degree of perfection to which 
this type has been realised has varied very largely, 
as in different men, so in different ages and countries, 
and has seldom or never reached its ideal complete- 



396 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

ne^s. To secure tlie supreme object of awakening 
the latent emotion of reverence, dull and feeble as 
it naturally must have been with primitive men, sa- 
vage or nomad, men crushed by the hard necessities 
of material hfe, a direct sanction was frequently given 
by the empirical instincts of their spiritual guides to 
some one of the lower and stronger passions, whether 
vanity or anger or even desire, as in the polytheism 
of India, or fear of future torment, as in Mohammedan 
and in most Christian churches, in order that by the 
alliance of its added energy some effective discipline 
might be imposed upon the rest. So far as these lower 
motives have been used, the ideal type of religion, the 
true government and culture of the soul, has been im- 
perfectly attained. And the imperfection is only ren- 
dered tolerable by comparing it with the alternative 
seen in morbid and corrupt periods of the world's his- 
tory; that chaos and anarchy of the moral nature justly 
branded by former ages under the name of irreligion. 
The method by which Religion pursues her object of 
securing union among men; the scheme of faith on 
which the minds and hearts of fellow- worshippers are 
fixed, has, it is true, often proved, and still proves, a 
source of disunion amono;st men. But here it is not 
religion, as in his indignant scorn Lucretius would 
have us believe, that is to blame. It is that, owing 
to the unequal stages of maturity to which the human 
intellect in different nations has grown, the true con- 
ception of a dogma in which all men can unite has 
hitherto been wanting. The nations of the world 
differ, as each nation at different stages of its own 
growth has differed, in their mode of regarding the 
relation of their own life to the Universe around 
them. And this difference we may explain by the 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 397 

sociological law* discovered by Comte ; according to 
which all human conceptions, whether relating to the 
external world or to man's own nature, pass, or tend 
to pass, with various degrees of rapidity through three 
stages of development. Explaining phenomena at 
first by supernatural agencies, and afterwards by 
metaphysical abstractions, men end in the final or 
positive stage by limiting themselves to the study of 
their laws of succession and similitude. 

Applying this law to the explanation of Chinese 
civilisation, we find, as we might expect, that the 
Chinese mind has not yet passed, collectively speak- 
ing, beyond the first of these stages ; that it still re- 
mains, that is, in the supernatural, or, as it has been 
also called, the theological stage. In this stage the 
phenomena of nature are conceived to be produced 
by the agency of affections, of passions, of wills, ana- 
logous to our own. But in this phase of belief 
there are two successive degrees, widely different yet 
passing into each other by very slow gradations. In 
the first, the affection or will is conceived as residiag 
in the object regarded; in the second, as residing 
outside it. The first of these degrees is Fetishism; 
the second Theism, whether polytheism or mono- 
theism. To the Fetishist the tree, or rock, or river 
is animated, like his own body, with vital and moral 
forces ; is itself living. To the Theist it is but dead 
inanimate matter, moulded by the will of a god. 

* Of this law Mr. Mill observes : "It could not easily be conceived 
from tbe mere enunciation of such a proposition what a flood of light 
it lets in upon the whole course of history ; when its consequences are 
traced, by connecting with each of the three states of human intellect 
which it distinguishes, and with each successive modification of those 
three states, the correlative condition of other social phenomena." 
Mill's Logic ^ vol. ii. p. 514. 



398 ENGLAISTD AND CHINA. 

The national religion of the Chinese is Fetishism 
in its most complete and highly-developed form. 
It is the religion which we find in the primitive 
history of all other nations, but which from various 
causes, as yet not known to us, has been systematised 
and rendered comparatively permanent in China to 
an extent unparalleled elsewhere. It endows the ob- 
jects of the surrounding world, the Sky, the Earth, 
the Sea, the Wmds, with the emotions and volitions 
of the human soul. It is a conception wholly dif- 
ferent from that of the Greek or Hindoo polytheist. 
The polytheist conceives of a visible or invisible 
being, endowed to an extraordinary degree mth 
human powers, regulating the movements of some 
particular class of natural objects. He abstracts the 
properties of those objects, and personifies his ab- 
straction. The Sea for him is not a living creature; 
but he believes in the God of the Sea, endowed with 
its rage, its calm, and its strength. The Sun is the 
dwelling-place of a bright resplendent Phoebus, not 
the very deity himself The Winds are but inanimate 
masses of moving atmosphere, but they obey the 
mandates of a personal and superhuman iEolus. But 
the Fetishist has no conception of the power apart 
from the objects which exhibit it. It is the concrete 
individual tree or river which he worships ; not the 
abstract properties of the grove or of the stream 
personified in a Dryad or a River-god. 

It is on this, the primitive religion of mankind, 
that Chinese civilisation is based. The subsequent 
phases of belief through which other nations have 
passed have not arisen in China, and exist there, if 
at all, yet only as foreign importations, modifying 
the ancient system more or less, but in no way sub- 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 399 

verting or superseding it.* Theocratic polytheism, 
as we hear of it in Egypt, Assyria, and Peru, as we 
still contemplate it in India, forms no portion of 
her history. The fundamental institution of theo- 
cracy is wantmg. Society has never been divided 
into castes. There are no hereditary trades ; no here- 
ditary priesthood; not even, strictly speaking, that 
most long-lived of all the institutions of caste, a 
hereditary monarchy. Still fewer traces do we find 
of the ulterior phases which in Western Europe have 
marked the progress of humanity. If polytheism is 
unknown, monotheism, which is, in fact, its final and 
most concentrated form, is unknown also. Amidst 
the religious revolutions which elsewhere have pre- 
ceded and directed the revolutions of social life, China 
has been content to abide by and to develop the 
simple faith of her earliest infancy, the worship of the 
Sky and of the Earth, the worship of the Dead. 

On the basis of this simple elementary faith a 
rich growth of noble precepts, of glorious memories, 
of heroic lives, of sacred traditions, was found pos- 
sible. Men bowed down before the Sky, nightly and 
daily revolving its myriad lights around them, as to 

* Buddhism, Mohammedanism, and Catholicism have each found 
entrance into China. Of these, the first alone has exercised any im- 
portant influence. It was introduced during the first century of the 
Christian era. Its temples and monasteries are widely spread ; and by 
superficial observers it has been often taken for the dominant religion. 
Its importance, however, is far more apparent than real. Those who 
adopt it do not on that account relinquish the essential institutions of 
Confucianism ; and by the educated class it is held in small respect. 
The Emperor Kang-hi, though a professed Buddhist, openly ridiculed 
Buddhist ceremonies ; while of the worship of Heaven and of ancestors 
he never spoke but in terms of the deepest reverence. Kicci, the foun- 
der of the Jesuit mission, began by adopting the costume of a Buddhist 
bonze ; but he soon found out his mistake, and exchanged his dress for 
that of a Confucian literate. 



400 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

the highest object of their awe, as to a will more 
powerful than their own or than the wills that ani- 
mated the other beings of the world, to whose high 
mandates obedience or disobedience brought happi- 
ness or woe. Next in power was the Earth, the 
mother of all living, nourishing her children in their 
need, and at last receiving them again into her 
bosom. For the Earth too, like the Sky, was to 
them a being of like passions with themselves ; a 
being to be propitiated in yearly season mth prayer 
and sacrifice, and who in her moments of wrath 
could give by famine and earthquakes plain signals to 
men and to their rulers that they should repent. 

The truest test of the power of a religion is its 
power to give calm or comfort in the time of death. 
And death to these worshippers brought no terrors. 
For all matter being conceived by them as endowed 
with living force, with will, and with desire, they 
could not understand the rigid line which in more 
modern thought has separated the living from the 
dead. That the lips were mute, the limbs still, that 
the pulse had ceased to beat, that there was no longer 
any painful murmur of the breath, were doubtless 
very strange and awful changes. But they were no 
proof that the pallid form which they loved had 
ceased to love. They showed only the will of 
Heaven that he should be restored to his long- 
home in the lap of earth; there to rest as a new 
power, an object of reverent worship. They carried 
him to some lonely hill-summit; trees and flowers 
were planted there; and it became a sacred and in- 
violable spot, where the mourner felt the presence of 
an unseen love, and held sweet yet close communion 
with those who had passed from sight. There the son 



ENGLAXD AND CHINA. 401 

came for years to mourn his father, the wife her 
husband; thither when they died their children fol- 
lowed them; until, when generation after generation 
had followed one another thus, each mourner be- 
came unawares a partaker in the hallowing influence 
of the Past, and passionate grief was purified and 
calmed at entrance into the solemn assemblage of 
the Dead. 

And the whole social fabric of China is in accord- 
ance with this faith. In Africa, in Polynesia, and, 
so far as our imperfect records enable us to trace, in 
the early history of all civilised nations. Fetishism 
is found correlated with the simj^lest possible of 
social organisations, that which consists simply of 
the aggregation of a few families, under the direc- 
tion of their oldest members. In such a society the 
fetishes or objects of worship may vary not only for 
each tribe, but for each family, and in some cases for 
each individual.* As there were no gods, there were 
no priesthoods; no families set apart from the rest, 
with a divine right to rule men, either spiritually or 
temporally. For not even with the imperial family 
has the hereditary principle been interpreted with 
nearly the same strictness as in most other countries. 
In every respect the Chinese constitution of society 
may be regarded as a gigantic amplification of the 
constitution of the family. The family is, no doubt, 
the constituent element of which all societies are com- 
posed; just as, in the body, all tissues, nervous or 
muscular, are generated from the primitive cellular 

* The household gods of ^Eneas or of Eachel illustrate this simple 
phase, and show too its survival amidst more complicated religious 
modes. Astrolatry, in which the fetishes were necessarily the same for 
all, would seem to be the transition- stage between Fetishism and Poly- 
theism. 

DD 



402 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

tissue ; but whereas in other societies we find dif- 
ferentiation into classes and institutions which have 
no direct analogue in the family, in China we find 
far less of this, far more of adherence to the primitive 
social tissue, to the ^matriarchal type. On this type 
the village and the empire are alike moulded. The 
position of the emperor is not the absolute jurisdic- 
tion of a divine autocrat who "can do no wrong;" 
it is that of the father m a family. Not as the divme 
high priest, but as the " father and mother of his 
people" (to use the Chinese expression), does he 
ofi'er the yearly and monthly sacrifices to Heaven and 
to Earth. And what the emperor is to the empire, 
that the elders are in the village.* Absolutism has 
no place in the Chinese constitution. In their re- 
ligion they have no conception of an absolute power ; 
for the Sky is to them but one among many fetishes, f 
the most powerful, it is true, yet modified by the 
rest. And similarly, the emperor, the son of the 
Sky, reigning by its will, has no absolute right ex- 
cept by virtue of obeying its mandates. And this 
limitation of his power is far from being theoretical 
merely. In the book of Mencius, one of the four 
sacred books which are taught in every tillage- 
school, and which are in fact the Bible or the Coran 
of the Chinese, we read the following dialogue : 



* Captain Brine, speaking of these " head men of the village," says : 
" The provincial administration of China presents few points of such 
remarkable nature as the peculiar position and authority held by these 
men ; and it affords one of the many striking proofs of the tendency 
of the Chinese character to reverence old age, and be guided by its 
opinions." Taeping Rebellion^ p. 28. 

f " Heaven and Earth are mighty, it is true ; yet we find that they 
are not without defects." Qiiatre Livres sacres de la Chine, Pauthier's 
translation, Charpencier's edit. p. 73. 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 403 

"The king of Thsi asked Mencius: Is it true that Shing- 
thang dethroned Kie, and banished him; and that Wou-wang put 
Cheou-sin* to death ? 

" Mencius respectfully answered : So liistory relates. 

" Has, then, said the king, a minister or subject the right to 
dethrone or to kill a prince ? 

" He, replied Mencius, who commits an outrage upon humanity 
is called a bandit; he who commits an outrage upon justice is 
called a tjTant. I^ow bandits and tyrants are men whom we look 
upon as reprobate and outcast. I haye heard it said that Wou- 
wang put to death a reprobate outcast called Cheou-sin ; I never 
heard it said that he killed his prince."t 

Probably in no monarchical country has the 
principle of hereditary succession been so loosely re- 
garded. Every Chinaman has read in his sacred 
books that the earliest emperors, to whom all sub- 
sequent dynasties look as their highest exemplars 
and types, chose not their sons but their ablest minis- 
ters for their successors. Another dialogue from 
the book of Mencius illustrates the Chinese theory of 
empire very clearly. 

" Is it true, asked Wen-shang, that the Emperor Yao gave the 
empire to Shun ? 

" Not so, replied Mencius ; the son of Heayen cannot bestow 
the empire on any man. 

" I know it ; but since Shun obtained the empke, from whom 
did he obtain it ? 

" From Heaven. 

" Did Heaven in bestowing the empire declare its will in clear 
and audible words ? 

"Assuredly not. Heaven speaks not. It makes known its 
will by human actions and by great events ; and that is aU. 

" By human actions and by great events? What mean you? 

" The son of Heaven can only put forth some one for the 



* Kie and Cheou-sin were the last, respectively, of the 1st and 2d 
dynasties. 

t Quatre Livres sacres de la Chine, p. 251. 



404 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

acceptance of Heaven; he cannot ordain that Heaven shall confer 
on him the empire. The vassals of the empire may propose a 
man to the son of Heaven; they cannot ordain that the son of 
Heaven shall give him the dignity of vassal prince. The first 
officer of a town may propose a man to the prince vassal ; he 
cannot ordain that the prince vassal shall make him a first officer. 
Yao proposed Shun to Heaven; Heaven accepted him. He showed 
him to the people covered with glory; the people accepted him. 
Therefore did I say, Heaven speaks not ; it declares its will by 
human actions and by great events, nothing more. 

"What mean you by your words, 'he proposed him to the 
Heaven, and the Heaven accepted him ; he showed him to the 
people covered with glory, and the people accepted him' ? 

" He ordered him to perform the rites of sacrifice, and his 
sacrifices were well pleasing to the powers; thus Heaven accepted 
him. He made him the chief minister of state, and the affairs of 
state were well ordered; all the families of the empire were at 
peace and satisfied; thus the people accepted him. Heaven gave 
him the empire, and the people also gave it. Therefore I said, 
* the son of Heaven cannot of his own accord give the empire to 
any man.' Shun helped Yao to administer for twenty-eight years. 
When Yao died and the three years' mourning were ended, Shun 
left the son of Yao, and withdrew to the south of the South 
River, to leave him the empire. But the great vassals of the 
empire, who came in spring and autumn to swear faith and 
homage, did not go to the son of Yao, but to Shun. Those who 
had suits to be decided went not to the son of Yao, but to Shun. 
The poets who sung of great achievements, sung not the deeds 
of the son of Yao, but of Shun. Therefore said I that it was 
the work of the power of Heaven. Then Shun came into the 
central kingdom and ascended the throne. Had he staid in the 
palace of Yao, and kept his son under constraint, that would have 
been to usurp the empire, not to receive it from Heaven. It has 
been said of old, 'The Heaven sees, but sees through the eyes 
of my people; the Heaven hears, but hears through the ears of my 
people.' And this it is I meant to say. 

" Wen-shang said again : It is said that after the time of 
Yao the empire was no longer given to the most wise, but passed 
to the son. Was that so? 

" It was not so, said Mencius. If Heaven gives the em- 
pire to the Avise minister, then it is given to him; if to the 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 405 

son, then it is given to him. Shun put forward Yu for Heaven's 
acceptance. After seventeen years Shun died. Yu mourned 
him for three yeai'S ; then he left the son of Shun, and with- 
di'ew to the country of Yang-shing. But the people of the em- 
pire followed him, as after the death of Yao they had followed 
not the son of Yao but Shun. Yu put forward Y for Heaven's 
acceptance. After seven years Yu died. After the three years of 
mom'uing, Y left the son of Yu, and withdrew to the north of 
Mount Ki-chan. But the people and the great vassals and the 
poets did not come to Y, but to Khi the son of Yu, saying: He is 
the son of our prince. The cause was that the son of Yao and of 
Shun had fallen away fi-om the virtues of their fathers. But Khi 
the son of Yu being a wise man accepted and continued with 
due respect his father's ways of governing. Moreover, whereas 
Shun and Yu were first ministers for many years, Y was minister 
for only a few years. All these things are the work of the Heaven; 
they depend not upon man. For that which works and brings 
about in ways which we cannot see is the Heaven ; that which 
comes without man's causing, it is the Heaven's decree."* 

The briefest notice of Chinese society would be 
too brief, would indeed be altogether abortive, -with- 
out some reference to the man to whose heroic and 
saintly life so large a share of its highest attributes 
are due. Great men are of their time and of their 
country. They transcend both, they modify and 
mould both ; but in both they are deeply rooted, and 
with both they intensely sympathise ; even when, like 
Dante and Milton, fallen on evil days, their sympathy 
can find no vent but hi words of indignation and 
fierce invective. 

Confucius, or Khoung-Fou-tseu, the consolidator, 
rather than the founder, of Chinese religion and so- 
ciety, was born in the year 551 B.C., and died about 
the time of the battle of Salamis. His father was 
governor of Tseou, a smaU town in the province of 

''' Quatre Livres sacres de la Chine, pp. 367-370. 



406 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

Shan-toung. But his father died early; and Con- 
fucius owed his early training to a wise and devoted 
mother. It was her chief care that he should enter 
early upon the duties of a citizen ; and at her desire 
he accepted at the early age of seventeen a subordi- 
nate office in the inspection of the corn-market. In 
this and other more important offices he distinguished 
himself by extraordinary care and vigilance in the 
detection of fraud, and in the acquisition of admmis- 
trative details, especially of every thing relating to 
agriculture. When he was twenty-four years old, 
his mother died. It had been in ancient times a 
custom that the son at the father's or the mother's 
death should retire from public life for three years. 
Confucius, in whose mind no doubt the germs of his 
peculiar method of social renovation had been long 
growing, revived this custom. In those three years 
of solitude his scheme of life matured itself by 
meditation and by study of the ancient writings, 
traditions, and institutions of China. His whole con- 
ception was to recall his countrymen to these ancient 
traditions ; to coordinate them into a coherent sys- 
tem, to infuse new life mto them, and thus to lay 
down a definite and firm basis of conviction and of 
conduct. His time of retirement ended, he spent 
the next twenty years of his life m travelling through 
the various principalities of which China at that time 
consisted.* During this period we find him propa- 
gating his convictions in every way that circum- 
stances admitted ; often invited to the various courts, 
where his varied knowledge and his grasp of admi- 

* The limits of his action seem to have been Pe-tchi-li and the 
river Yang-tse to the north and south ; the provinces of Shan-toung 
and Sheu-si to the east and west. 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 407 

nistrative detail made his services most valuable; 
as often banished from these courts when his severe 
and righteous counsels were rejected; preaching then 
to his more intimate disciples, or winning casual by- 
standers by familiar and Socratic dialogues; always 
and in every place holding fast to the great purpose 
of his life, the consolidation and renewal of all that 
was noble in the old traditions, the enforcement of 
this new and yet ancient standard of duty on his 
fellow-men, and as the surest path to that end, the 
maintenance of his own life to the level of that 
standard. At the age of fifty-one, his career as a 
teacher was interrupted by an earnest invitation from 
the Prince of Lou, whose affairs had been disorgan- 
ised by unscrupulous officials, to accept the office of 
prime minister. He unwillingly consented; but on 
the absolute condition that his predecessor in the 
office should be put to death. Of the guilt of this 
man there was no doubt : the only hesitation arose 
from his power ; but weak philanthropy, where public 
welfare and morality were at stake, was no part of 
Confucius' character. After full investigation the 
sentence was at once carried into effect ; and his 
energetic and upright administration in a few years 
restored order and prosperity. At the death of the 
Prince of Lou, whose successor was of a different 
temper, Confucius resumed his missionary life. The 
number of his disciples had by this time increased, 
and his doctrine had become widely disseminated. 
The last years of his life were passed in his native 
province, and were devoted to a more methodic 
elaboration of his system. They were embittered by 
losses ; that of his wife, his son, and his favourite 
disciple, Yen-houei. They were saddened also by 



408 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

the sense, which all the greatest mmds must feel, of 
failure and of shortcoming. Giving way for a mo- 
ment to these feelings a few days before his death, 

" The pillars of the house are giving way," he said, " and 
there will soon be no shelter; the grass is withering np, and 
there is no place where to sit down and rest ; the pure doctrine 
had altogether disappeared, it was utterly forgotten ; I strove to 
restore it to its ancient power. I have not been able to do so. 
Will there be any one when I am gone to take this heavy task 
upon him?" 

But, in general, his last weeks were spent in calm 
provision and counsel for those who were to follow 
him: 

" In the unhappy state that we are in," he said, " and with 
the repugnance that every where prevails for moral reformation 
and for the revival of ancient doctrine, you can hardly hope to 
bring the mass of men to the standard of duty. You see what 
small success has followed my own efforts, efforts unceasingly 
maintained during my long life. "What you may hope to do is to 
help to preserve the trust confided to me, and which I now hand 
to you. You in turn will transmit it to others, so that it may 
reach future generations." 

He died in the 73d year of his age. He was 
buried by his disciples in strict accordance with 
ancient rites. Increasing multitudes flocked every 
year to his tomb. Every century the influence of 
his name grew stronger ; and under the Han dynasty, 
about one hundred years before the Christian era, 
the worship of Confucius became formally incorpo- 
rated into the religion of the emj^ire. Under later 
dynasties, these reverential feelings have continually 
strengthened. The introduction of Buddhism has 
had no power to weaken them. The descendants 
of Confucius still live, and enjoy, by a solitary ex- 
ception, hereditary honours. 



ENGLA^T) AND CHINA. 409 

The life of Confucius differs altogether from that 
of other religious renovators. The founders of the 
Buddhist, Parsee, Christian, and Mohammedan sys- 
tems proclaimed new doctrines, which clashed utterly 
with the accepted faith of those around them. Their 
work, therefore, was twofold ; they came not merely 
to fulfil, but to destroy. They brought peace among 
men, but they brought also division. Their doc- 
trines brought joy and strength to the noblest minds, 
but set before them a life of defensive and aggressive 
struggle. Between Buddhism and Brahminism, be- 
tween Christianity and Paganism, between Moham- 
medanism and Byzantine Christianity, there could be 
no peace. And the strife was not merely between 
their own small society and the government of their 
state ; it crossed the threshold of home ; it set the fa- 
ther against the son, the daughter against the mother. 
Xeedful as these changes were, grand and ennobling 
as were their results, they were yet attended with the 
mischief, from which no revolutions can be exempt, 
of destroying many of the ties which give dignity 
and stability to human life; of undermining for a 
time at least the institution of the family, the very 
basis of all social existence. 

The destiny of Confucius was altogether different. 
It was not his function to be the revealer of a new- 
faith. The doctrine that he preached contained no 
watchword of battle, no germ of future strife. Of all 
his sayings there was none more frequently, more 
emphatically repeated than this, that what he taught 
was not new but old. He claimed the discovery of 
no fresh truth ; he strove only to recall men to 
ancient truths long rejected and forgotten. After 
scrupulous and exemplary fulfilment of every filial 



410 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

and civic duty, he devoted many years of thought 
to the study of the ancient records and traditions of 
his country. On these, and not on any divine reve- 
lation, the New Life which he preached was based. 
Doubtless these ancient precepts underwent a mar- 
vellous and spiritual change, unconsciously to him- 
self, in passing through the alembic of his grand and 
simple mind : doubtless higher elevations and nobler 
ranges of duty rose up on the foundations of the old. 
But as the prophets of other times spoke with the 
voice of God, so Confucius spoke with the voice of 
the Past ; and in laying down the scheme of duty 
which has guided the hearts of millions for two thou- 
sand years, that sanction sufficed him. 

Confucius wrote no books, properly speaking. 
He compiled and edited in a systematic form, mth 
comments, the ancient traditions, whether historical, 
poetical, or ceremonial. These compilations, namely, 
the Y-king or book of transformations, the Chou- 
king or book of annals, the Chi-king or book of 
verses, and the Li-ki or book of rites, underwent 
still further alterations under the Han dynasty (200 
B.C. to 263 A.D.), and since that time have remained 
unaltered. 

There are four books that go by his name. The 
first, Ta-Hio, or Great Study, consists of a commen- 
tary by Theng-tseu, an intimate friend and disciple of 
Confucius, on a few paragraphs which appear to have 
been written by the master. The second, Shung- 
Yung, or the Just Mean, was written by his grand- 
son, from recollection. The Lun-Yu, or Philosophic 
Conversations, was also compiled by his immediate 
disciples. The fourth, Hiao-King, or Filial Obedi- 
ence, was written like the first by Theng-tseu. 



ENGLAXD AXD CHINA. 411 

From these works Tre get a clear conception of 
his moral system. We find a scheme of life and of 
duty eminently coherent and practical. Of meta- 
physical speculation, of knowledge for the sake of 
knowledge, of abstruse incjuiry pursued for the keen 
intellectual pleasure of the chase, Confucius had no 
conception; and had it been suggested, he would 
have utterly repudiated it, as an unwarrantable waste 
of effort. Equally averse was he to enter into super- 
natural inquiries, or to any pretence of possessing 
miraculous power. 

" To seek the principles of things which are beyond human 
understanding; to perform extraordinary actions beyond human 
poTver; to work miracles in order to have admirers and disciples 
in fature ages; for this I have no desire."* 

In the Ta-Hio, the great problem of life is clearly 
conceived. 

" The object of the Great Study is to develop and bring to 
light the luminous principle of reason which we have received 
from Heaven, to renew men, and to set before ourselves perfection, 
or the sovereign good as the great purpose of life. 

" We must first know the object for which we ought to strive, 
and then form oiu- resolution; the resolution formed, the spirit 
becomes calm, and we enjoy that peace which cannot be troubled; 
enjoying that peace, we are enabled to meditate on the causes 
and consequences of things around us and of human actions, and 
thereby to reach the state of perfection we desire." 

If this should seem unpractical, read what fol- 
lows: 

" The princes of old, who desired to foster in their kingdom 
the precious principle of reason received from Heaven, endea- 
Yom-ed first to govern their kingdoms well; desiring to govern 
their kingdoms well, they endeavotired first to order their famihes 

^ Quatre Livres sacres de la Chine, p. 72. 



412 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

aright; desiring to order their families rightly, they endeayoured 
first to reform themselves, to render their own souls upright, to 
keep their purposes pure and sincere; in order to do this they 
strove to perfect their knowledge of morality, and penetrate the 
causes and consequences of human action. 

"These being penetrated, and moral truth thus understood, 
the soul becomes upright, and the individual character reformed; 
then the family is well ordered, then the state well governed, and 
then peace and harmony is restored to the world. 

"From the most exalted to the most obscure and humble, the 
duty is the same for all, self-reformation, self-improvement; as 
the basis of all progress and moral growth."* 

The Shung-Yung, or the Maintenance of the 
Just Mean, is the most systematic of these works. 
By the Mean seems to be understood the state of 
perfect harmony in the World and in Man, which 
results from the right balance of the affections and 
desires under the control of the high principle of 
duty; in other words, of "the Will or Law im- 
planted by Heaven in all beings of the Universe." 
For not man merely, but all nature was regarded 
as penetrated with this higher principle : 

" How vast and deep," said the philosopher, " are the subtle 
powers of Heaven and of Earth ! We look for them, but find them 
not; we listen for them, but hear them not; they are one with 
the substance of things, and cannot be separated. Through them 
it is that men purify and sanctify their hearts, and ofier up 
oblations to their forefathers. There are oceans of subtle intelli- 
gences above us, and to the right hand and the left, surrounding 
us on every side."| 

According to his conception, there is in man and 
in all things a principle akin to and corresponding 

* Quatre Livres sacres de la Chine, pp. 41, 42. The above are the 
words of Confucius, not of his commentator. The comments consist 
chiefly of historical examples. 

t Ibid. p. 77. 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 413 

with the Will or Law of Heaven. The object of a 
moral system or rule of life is to make this principle 
supreme. But it must be recognised and distin- 
guished from other principles of action. The dis- 
tinguishmg characteristic of the sage is therefore to 
understand the human heart, and analyse its passions. 
But for this the highest summit of spiritual perfec- 
tion is indispensable. 

" Only tliose men who have reached sovereign perfection can 
thoroughly know the law of then- own being, and the duties 
which follow from that law; knowing this, they understand the 
nature of other men, and can teach them how to obey the law of 
Heayen; understanding this, they can understand also the nature 
of other living beings, and can enable them also to fulfil the law 
of their being; thus, by their high faculties, they can aid in the 
transformation and sustenance of all beings; and constitute, as it 
were, a third power between the Heaven and the Earth."* 

Yet while transcendent goodness and power are 
thus placed in their true position, the lower steps of 
the moral scale are not neglected. Next to the saint 
who reaches this high state from innate purity and 
nobleness of nature, without pain and struggle, is the 
sage who strives towards it by earnest self-culture, 
self-restraiut, self-purification, never losing sight of his 
object, never wholly attaining it. Others there are, 
and in far greater numbers, 

"who either have never so striven, or if they strive, yet often fail; 
let them not be discouraged: who have never meditated, or who 
if they meditate, yet have never gained a clear knowledge of 
good; let them not be discom^aged: who have never discerned 
good from evil, or at least who have never been able to discern it 
clearly; who have never practised what is right, or who, if they 
practise it, yet never expend their whole force thereon; let not 
such be discouraged or stay their efforts: what others do at one 

* Quatre Livres sacres de la Chine, p. 90. 



414 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

effort, they shall do with ten; what others do with a hundred 
trials, they shall accomplish with a thousand." 

Confucius is not content, however, with generah- 
ties. He lays down with considerable minuteness the 
five great classes of mutual obligations into which 
he conceives the duties of men may be divided: 
those of 

Prince and ministers. 

Father and children. 

Husband and wife. 

Elder brother and younger brother. 

Friend and friend. 

To accomplish these duties three great moral facul- 
ties have been given us : " Reason, or the light of 
intelligence, to distinguish good from evil; humanity, 
or universal benevolence; and moral courage."* 

Nine rules are given for good government : 

1. Self-culture. 

2. Eeverence for wise men. 

3. Love for parents and relatives. 

4. Respect for chief functionaries. 

5. Good relations with subordinate officials. 

6. Fatherly love for people. 

7. Encouragement of science and art. 

8. Welcome to strangers. 

9. Treatment of vassals in friendly spirit. 

Then the consequences to the ruler of each of 
these rules are given : 

1. Duty will be paid to him. 

2. He will be instructed in principles of right 

and wrong. 

"' Quatre Livres sacres de la Chine, p. 83. 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 415 

3. Different members of his family will agree. 

4. State affairs ^vill be in good order. 

5. Subordinates will be zealous in their duty. 

6. The people will imitate their superiors. 

7. His o^vn wealth ^vill be spent rationally. 

8. Eminent men will come from foreign re- 

gions. 

9. His rule will be respected by all vassals. 

Then the means of performing each of these 
duties are detailed. But all these rules, he continues, 
spring from one great princij^le, the Law of Heaven, 
of Perfection. With a clear conception of the law of 
duty, and with resolute determination to follow it, 
we shall not fail. 

Such, in faint outline, was the teaching of this 
great man. The reader of the works from which 
I quote will find growing round the framework 
of his systematic structure numberless beautiful 
maxims of practical morality that are often fancied 
to be pecuhar to Western Europe. " The doctriae 
of our master," said his disciple Theng-tseu, "is 
simply this : to have an upright heart, and to 
love vour neiohbour as yourself."* And ao^aui: 
" Tseu-kounc^ asked : Is there a word in the Ian- 
guage which is of itself enough as a guide for 
our life ? The wise man answered : There is the 
word chou^ of which the ineaniag is this : What we 
would should not be done to us, let us not do to 
others."! 

By Confucius as well as by the most eminent of his 
successors ^lencius, the strongest belief is asserted in 

*• Quatre Livres sacres de la Chine, p. 86. 
t Ibid. pp. 122, 192. 



416 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

the existence of innate goodness and benevolence 
in human nature, as opposed to the doctrine of total 
corruption. 

" All men," says Mencius, " have in themselves the feelings 
of mercy and pity, of shame and hatred of vice, of respect and 
reverence. It is for each one by culture to let these feelings 
grow or to let them wither. They are part of the organisation of 
man as much as the limbs or the senses, and may be trained as 
well. The mountain Nieou-chan naturally brings forth beautiful 
trees. Even when the trunks are cut down, young shoots will con- 
stantly rise up. If cattle are allowed to feed there, the mountain 
looks bare : shall we say, then, that bareness is natural to that 
mountain ? So the lower passions are let loose to eat down the 
nobler growth of reverence and love in the heart of man : shall 
we therefore say that there are no such feelings in his heart at all? 
Under the quiet peaceful airs of morning and of evening the 
shoots tend to grow again; the primitive nature of man is for a 
while restored. But if the evil forces of the daytime are so 
strong as to overbear these blessed influences, they lose at last 
their restorative power; the higher part of man disappears; his 
nature seems like that of the brutes; and men say that this 
higher part never existed at all. 

" There is a feeling in all men which makes them love some- 
thing better than life; hate something worse than death. Some 
men strengthen that feeling; some let it die out; but all have it. 

" Humanity is the heart of man ; justice is the path of man. 
To leave the path and not follow it, to lose the heart and not 
find it, this is the real cause for grief. If so much as but the 
fourth finger of our hand is maimed, we go from province to 
province to find one that will cure it. And yet if our heart is 
perverted from its true human likeness, we take no thought to 
get back the sense of justice and uprightness that we have lost."* 

" To know Heaven, is to develop the principle of our higher na- 
ture. To preserve and foster this higher nature, is to conform to 
Heaven's decree. To take no thought whether our life be long or 
short; to strive equally in either case to improve our nature; this 
is the order which we receive from Heaven ; this is our Destiny. 
Whoso dies after having practised in every point the law of moral 

* Quatre Livres sacres de la Chine, pp. 404-407. 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 417 

dntj within ns, fulfils the just decree of Heaven. He who dies a 
criminal fulfils it not."* 

Handed doAvn as a trust by Confucius to his 
successors, these doctrines have formed, and still 
form, the ground- work of the elaborate and compre- 
hensive scheme of education, by which the govern- 
ing class in China has been trained for its duties. 
And when it is considered that this governing class 
forms no aristocratic hereditary caste, but that each 
member of it has been selected after stringent exami- 
nationf from the students of the colleges and schools 
which are brought within the reach of every thrifty 
peasant in the empire, it is a moderate conclusion, 
that m no other part of the world, unless we except 
Western Europe in times when Catholicism had not 
lost its power, have such continuous and systematic 
efforts been made for the dissemination of moral 
truth. 

In the brief review that has been given of Chi- 
nese history, the common notion, that China is in a 
state of social and political stagnation, has been, I 
think, sufficiently disproved. I have shown a contin- 
uous and progressive change, moral, intellectual, and 
material, from the earhest emperors to Confucius, 
from Confucius to the time of Thsin-chi, when the 
imperial power was thoroughly constituted, and an 
aggregate of small kingdoms firmly knit together 
mto an organic whole : still further advancement in 
the nmth and tenth centuries A.D., the Augustan 
age of Chinese literature, when printing was in- 
vented, and the system of appointment to office by 

=- Quatre Livres sacres de la Chine, p. 430. 

f For a most mteresting account of these examinations, see Mr. 
Meadows' book on Rebellions in China. 

EE 



418 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

examinations open to the whole people was fully 
developed ; finally, culmination of greatness in the 
last century, the age of Kang-hi and Kien-loung, 
when China, prosperous at home, extended the reach 
of her strong and civilising influence over the semi- 
barbarous regions of Tartary and Thibet. 

But though a movement, and a progressive 
movement, may easily be traced by observers' who 
are not wilfully disdainful of every mode of civilisa- 
tion but their own, the broad fact still remains, that 
such progress will bear no comparison with the 
marvellously rapid, fertile, and many-sided develop- 
ment which has been visible in Western Europe 
for more than two thousand years. China could 
boast of an advanced civilisation, of great heroes, 
and of lofty moralists, before Homer sang, before 
Troy was built, before the Greek gods had gathered 
on Olympus. China had an extensive printed lite- 
rature, and an elaborate educational system, at a 
time when Christian emperors could hardly read or 
write. To what cause, then,, is it due, that in the 
extreme West of the Eurasian continent, scientific 
discovery and material improvement have for some 
centuries been proceeding with such accelerated ve- 
locity, that to superficial observers the comparatively 
slow movement of Chinese civilisation should have 
appeared retrogression or stagnation ? 

The explanation lies in this. Western Europe 
has for nearly three thousand years been the scene 
of a series of distinct and peculiar social revolutions 
in which the other populations of our planet have 
taken no share. The result of each of these move- 
ments has been to develop some one element of 
human nature to high intensity irrespectively of 



ENGLAND AND, CHINA. 419 

the rest. Taking a broad view of Western history 
do^Yii to the close of the Middle Ages in the thir- 
teenth century, we find it falling naturally into 
three great periods, the Greek, the Roman, and the 
Feudal or Catholic. SjDeaking with the breadth 
necessary in the philosophy of history, it is beyond 
dispute that the Greek period developed the intellect, 
the Roman period the energies, the Catholic period 
the affections, to an intensity far surpassing their 
primeval growth in theocratic or fetishist societies. 
In Greece, for the first time in the world's history, 
we see the independent action of the intellectual 
powers ; in other words, truth sought, not for its 
moral or material value, but for its own sake. , Phi- 
losophers there had been in India or China ; but 
their philosophy, whether its problems were soluble 
or otherwise, dealt exclusively with the phenomena 
of human nature. Physical and mathematical ques- 
tions were pursued just so far as their bearing on 
practical life was apparent, and no farther. The sci- 
entific man, the type realised in its highest degree 
by Archimedes, was a phenomenon up to that time 
utterly without parallel. 

The destiny of Rome was to incorporate the sur- 
rounding nations into a political whole, and to dis- 
perse through the vast mass the results obtained by 
Greece. The Roman empire was the necessary an- 
tecedent to the commonwealth of nations, of which 
Western Europe now consists. The functions of 
Rome were, as Yirgil has described them, conquest, 
government, legislation. Before these transcendent 
objects all others yielded. The religion of the Ro- 
mans it has been well said was Rome. The high 
culture which the Roman intellect received from 



420 ENGLAl^D AND CHINA. 

Greece was never allowed to be expended in the search 
for abstract truth. Their intellect, heio'htened as its 
powers were, was wholly devoted to the service of 
the faculties of action. The science of Rome was 
legislation ; her art was government. 

But while the intellectual powers and the ener- 
gies of man were strengthened to an extraordinary 
degree by Greco-Eoman civilisation, there was no 
corresponding development of that side of our nature 
to which in the normal and natural condition of man 
the intellectual and active elements are subordinate; 
that is to say, of the affective or emotional nature. 
The harmony of our nature was broken. The due 
proportion of its functions was disturbed. The in- 
evitable result was social instability, anarchy, and cor- 
ruption. It was not that among the Greeks and Ro- 
mans there were not many instances of the highest 
devotion, of the strongest sense of moral duty ; but 
that these instances were on the whole exceptional, 
that the influences of the time were not such as to 
favour and increase them. 

Then a great and glorious effort was made to fill 
the void by St. Paul and the other founders of the 
Catholic Church. For many centuries the culture 
of the highest emotions of the soul, of love and re- 
verence, was accepted by all the nobler natures as 
the highest object of life. It would seem that the 
great problem of the harmonious evolution of man's 
nature was now to be solved. The increased de- 
velopment of intellect and energy was now counter- 
balanced by a noble culture of the affections; and 
a moral power arose in society, the power of the 
Catholic Church, capable of controlling for a time 
the coarse passions and energetic egotism of the feudal 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 421 

power. But the success of the attempt was short- 
lived ; and mediaeval society broke down, as Greek 
and Eoman society had broken down, by reason of 
its one-sidedness. The dogmas on which it rested 
were incompatible with free scientific thought; and 
therefore so long as it retained its power, thought 
was crushed by it. The element of Feeling, which, 
in the due harmony of our nature, ought indeed to 
preponderate over the rest, but yet in such a way as 
to further their free development, was rendered not 
merely preponderant, but tyrannical. The intellect 
was crushed by it, till it became rebellious ; and the 
practical activities, except during the brief period 
of the Crusades, found no place in it. 

Therefore the Catholic synthesis became a ruin; 
and the last five centuries have, to a great extent, 
been occupied with the process of its decline. The 
ascendency of the kings over the popes, the English 
and German reformations, the philosophical move- 
ment of the eighteenth century, and finally the 
mighty crisis of the French revolution, were the 
chief consecutive stages of the work. It is a period 
which presents two phases. It has been a time of 
intense intellectual and material progress. The in- 
tellect, freed from its servitude to the heart, left the 
study of theological questions, resumed the scientific 
study of the outer world where the Greek astrono- 
mers had left it, from the inorganic outer world as-, 
cended slowly to the world of man, and thus accu- 
mulated the materials and laid down the foundation 
for social reconstruction. But it has also been a 
time of anarchy, and, in the strictest sense of the 
term, of irreligion. The principles which bind men 
together, and by which the individual nature of man 



422 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

lias been controlled, have been more and more re- 
laxed. The social doctrine of the individuality and 
sovereignty of the individual; the moral doctrine 
that each passion or emotion of our nature, whether 
sympathetic or self- regarding, being all alike " facul- 
ties given by God," should be alike recognised and 
fostered ; such doctrines, whether in explicit or im- 
plicit ways, have been brought more and more 
strongly forward. It was inevitable that this con- 
dition should last until the basis for a more durable 
and comprehensive synthesis should be complete. 
Systems which, like the various forms of Protest- 
antism, used the weapon of free judgment merely 
to make an arbitrary selection of Catholic dogmas, 
retaining some, and replacing some by others equally 
questionable, were obviously not destined for any 
but a tem|)orary purpose. The only permanent 
mode in which harmony can be restored is one 
which shall restore the intellect to the service of 
the heart, and which yet shall leave that service free. 
As the ultimate result of its long period of uncon- 
trolled action, as the highest truth to which its power 
can ascend, the intellect must recognise its subordi- 
nation to the moral nature as the normal state of 
man. 

The respective position of Chinese and Western 
civilisation is now more intelligible. We have on 
the one side a more harmonious balance of powers 
less highly developed; on the other we have stronger 
forces emancipated from their primitive discipline, 
and wasting one another in their antagonism, because 
they have not yet found that higher and more har- 
monious discipline which awaits them in the future. 
China offers us the unaltered type of primitive health; 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 428 

the West exhibits the disease and suffering which 
marks the evolution to a higher type not yet real- 
ised. China has nothing in her annals comparable 
to the speculative power of Aristotle, the political 
grasp of Caesar, the fervid intensity of St. Paul or 
of St. Bernard, the audacious imagination of Shake- 
speare or of Dante. But in the person of her great 
sage she offers perhaps the most perfect type of 
morality, that is to say, of perfect manhood, that has 
ever yet commanded the general veneration of man- 
kind. History tells of none in whom such vigorous 
energies and such high powers of thought have been 
throughout a long life so completely under the do- 
minion of social sympathies, so continuously devoted 
to the service of others. 

Still, it will be said, the difficulty is not answered ; 
it is but restated, or at best only put a step further 
back. The question still recurs, why is it that, while 
the West has been the scene of such complicated evo- 
lutions, the East, and especially the extreme East, 
has developed so far more slowly ? 

Without attempting fully to account for what 
may perhaps be found ultimately connected with 
conditions of race, and other conditions of which we 
are at present equally ignorant, it is yet possible to 
put the problem in a more intelligible shape, to make 
it in short a case of a larger and m.ore general law. 
And this is all that in positive philosophy is implied 
in the word ' explanation.' 

The modern progress of Europe would have 
been impossible without the intellectual inheritance 
bequeathed by Greece. The speculations of Aris- 
totle moulded the theological teaching of the me- 
dia3val church. Modern geometry began with Des- 



424 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

cartes almost exactly at the point where the geometry 
of Apollonius left off. Since then intellectual progress 
has been continuous, and the connection between 
scientific research and industrial advancement has 
been too obvious to need demonstration. But the 
Chinese also possess, and have for many centuries 
possessed, an intellectual educated class. They have 
extensive libraries filled with the results of accumu- 
lated laborious research. Literature and study are 
honoured in China as they are honoured in few other 
nations, since they are made the highroad to political 
advancement. Is there then any difference between 
the speculations of the Chinese and those of Western 
philosophers sufficient to account for the discrepancy 
of result ? 

There is this fundamental difference. Those of 
the first are concrete; those of the second, abstract 
Every object is an assemblage of various qualities or 
phenomena, such as form, weight, colour, hardness, 
chemical composition, &c. In the study of natural ob- 
jects, therefore, there are two wholly distinct methods. 
The philosopher may either examine the object as it 
stands, that is to say, the concrete mass of phenomena 
which it offers; or he may choose to isolate, to ab- 
stract some one of the phenomena, as e.g. weight or 
colour, which are common to it and to other objects, 
and study its laws, ignoring for the time all the 
rest. The first mode of speculation, the concrete, 
is that which arises spontaneously in the most primi- 
tive stages of human progress. The obvious ma- 
terial necessities of man in the simplest state of 
society lead him to make and collect practical ob- 
servations on the objects around him and on his 
own organisation. But for all the higher purposes 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 425 

of science the other method is necessary. Each 
class of phenomena must be abstracted from the 
various beings in which it is found, and must form 
the object of special investigation, with the View of 
finding out the law of their coexistence and suc- 
cession. Thus we have the science of extension, of 
weight, of light, of heat, of electricity, of chemical 
composition, of life, &c. Our intellectual powers 
are not adequate to arrive at the true object of 
science, which is the prevision of events, except by 
studymg the laws of each class of phenomena sepa- 
rately, beginning with the most simple and general, 
and passing to those which are more complex, spe- 
cial, and dependent. Mere records of the past changes 
of the weather will not lead us to foretell future 
states of weather. Records of astronomical facts 
will not lead, except in the most imperfect and un- 
certain Avay, to prediction of eclipses. Records of 
the past history of man will not enable us to pro- 
phesy his future. The weather of each day is the 
result of a vast mass of phenomena, astronomical, 
thermal, electrical, &c. The modern savant studies 
the laws of each of these classes of phenomena sepa- 
rately ; and then the endeavour is made (however 
imperfectly as yet) to study their combined action, 
their resultant. So with astronomy. . So inadequate 
are our powers of studying concrete masses of phe- 
nomena, that we cannot even solve the problem of 
the mutual gravitation of the sun, moon, and earth, 
much less of all the bodies which compose the solar 
system. But by studying the abstract laws of gravi- 
tation, by examining the purely hypothetical case of 
two bodies attracting one another in space, we are 
enabled to discover the laws which act in so simple 



426 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

an instance : and by means of these to restore the 
problem subsequently to something like its original 
complexity. So with sociology. Each community 
offers a*vast mass of concrete details, in which it is 
impossible to discover any scientific law of develop- 
ment. The first object. of the sociologist is to ab- 
stract the details of race, climate, &c., and dis- 
cover the laws of social development common to 
all. To see how those laws are arrested or developed 
in any special case is a subsequent question. Thus 
the grand characteristic of Western speculation has 
been the creation of abstract science. 

In China, on the contrary, speculation is alto- 
gether of the concrete kind. We find vast collec- 
tions of observations of eclipses, earthquakes, and 
other astronomical and terrestrial facts, of natural 
history and of political history. But it is all obser- 
vation of the kind which in England is called prac- 
tical. It amounts simply to an accumulation of facts. 
Of the abstract sciences of geometry, mechanics, 
optics, chemistry, the Chinese have no conception. 
They are intellectually far less prepared for it than 
the Hindoos. And the ground-AVork of this peculiar 
mental state has been already described. It has 
been shown that Chinese religion is an elaborate 
development of Fetishism, that is, of the worship of 
concrete objects. The Chinese have never really 
passed into the polytheistic stage, which is the first 
great effort of the human mind towards the forma- 
tion of abstract conceptions. For Polytheism is 
the conception of a separate power directing each 
class of phenomena. The student of Greek, Ro- 
man, or Hindoo mythology finds a special deity for 
almost every abstract term. But the very language 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 427 

of China is deficient to* an extraordinary degree in 
abstract terms ; and such abstractions as are abso- 
lutely necessary for the business of life are expressed 
for the most part by bold metaphors. Coupled with 
this deficiency of abstract science, is the absence of 
the highest kind of poetry. As their science is con- 
crete, so their art is imitative. Of idealisation, which 
implies the exaltation of certain, qualities in the 
object, the diminution of others, which thus calls out 
into play faculties identical with those that are re- 
quired for the highest efforts of scientific abstraction, 
their art shows few traces. 

Their highest intellectual efforts have been be- 
stowed on ethics; the highest of all branches of 
study, the meeting point of theory and practice. The 
science of morals aims at the regulation of human 
action, the indication of duty. It implies a know- 
ledge of the ''mights of man;" of human organisa- 
tion, mental and physical; also a scientific estimate 
of the society in which the individual whose actions 
are examined lives. Ethics, therefore, imply pre- 
vious knowledge of sociology and of biology ; which 
last, again, involves the study of the physical sciences. 
It may be said, therefore, that Chinese ethics only 
share the defect of empiricism and incoherence with 
the ethical systems of Western Europe.* 

But, it will be asked, since millennial periods 
of struggle and anarchy of our various faculties 
have prov^ed necessary in the case of Europe, is 
there any alternative for China but that of passing 

* With reference to the part played by abstraction in European 
development, and to the correlation of the Chinese concrete philosophy 
with their fetishist religion, the above remarks have been suggested 
almost entirely by the Civilisation CJiinoise of P. Laffitte (Paris, Dunod 
1851). 



428 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

through similar subversive stages? If the Oriental 
nations are to attain our level, must not the revo- 
lution of their moral and mental nature take place 
also, as with the West, through successive phases 
of one-sided, disproportionate, and therefore revo- 
lutionary growth? Must not her intellect too be 
awakened by supernatural visions or metaphysical 
subtleties; her energies roused by a long period of 
warlike struggle; her moral sense deepened, as with 
mediaeval Europe, by the rigorous discipline of spiri- 
tual terrors ? Can the gulf which separates her 
civilisation from ours be overstepped at a leap ? 

Not so. Had Greek civilisation been crushed 
in its germ at Marathon and Salamis, and the con- 
sequent development of Western Europe rendered 
abortive, the destiny of leading the civilisation of 
the world would have fallen upon one of the Oriental 
nations, possibly upon China. And it is difficult to 
conceive that a stage of civilisation analogous to our 
own could have been reached in the first instance, 
without analogous periods of suffering and discord. 
But supposing the goal once reached, the difficult 
Alpine road once executed, later travellers pass 
easily where it cost centuries of toil and loss and 
painful error to the first uncertain pioneers. The 
world is so framed that the reward of those who 
have worked well is received by others. Those who 
come in at the eleventh hour profit by the labours 
of those who have borne the heat of the day. 
Once let the definite solution of our social problems 
be arrived at in Western Europe, once let the germs 
of a higher and more harmonious organisation of 
human life be visible there, and its acceptance by 
the East will not be long delayed. 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 429 

But till that time be come, the Oriental nations 
may well shrink from such contact with the West as 
has hitherto been obtruded upon them; contact with 
men who destroy the ties which bind their life toge- 
ther, leaving nothing to replace them ; who annihilate 
their institutions, and call it- commercial enlighten- 
ment ; who throw contempt on their religion, and call 
it a preparation for Christianity ; who bring desola- 
tion everywhere, and call it peace. 



CONCLUSION. 

What then is to be done ? Are matters to be left 
to take their course, certain as that course is to end 
in anarchy and misery to a third of the human race ? 
And if not, what, I shall be fairly asked, is the policy 
you recommend? Is it reasonable to expect that we 
can stand still; is it conceivable that we should re- 
trace our steps, that we should diminish our hard- 
won prestige, degrade ourselves before our Oriental 
subjects, and thus perhaps imperil the very fabric of 
imperial dominion? 

There are those to whom the preservation and 
even the extension of a vast empire, or rather of an 
incoherent collection of scattered dependencies, is 
something earnestly to be coveted for its o^tl sake; 
an object so grand and imposing, so closely con- 
nected with the honour of England, as to overbear 
every other consideration, and to weigh heavily in 
the balance against international justice and morality. 
To such, and though their number decreases daily, 
they are still many, this essay is not addressed. 

There is a far larofer class with whom the exten- 



430 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

sion of empire is a consideration of no moment, 
or with whom at least it is wholly subordinate to 
what with them is all-important, the extension of 
British commerce. Whether it be a good or whether 
it be an evil, it is an obvious fact that the increasing 
English population depends every year less and less 
upon its own internal resources, more and more upon 
slu increasing foreign trade. Every effort is conse- 
quently being .made to find fresh markets, and to 
estabhsh new treaties of commerce, in the West by 
fair means, in the East by foul. Our manufacturers 
and merchants, and our great governing families, are 
alike penetrated with the importance of this object. 
By the former it is desired as a means of wealth ; by 
the latter as a means of preserving internal tran- 
quillity, as a condition, therefore, of their own tenure 
of power. For extension of empire such men have 
no desire, except so far as the interests of trade de- 
mand it ; they would retain Gibraltar, not with the 
view of insulting Spain, but because it is a con- 
venient smuggling depot, or because it guards, or is 
believed to guard, our Mediterranean or Indian trade. 
And it is solely in the interests of the tea-trade and 
the silk-trade that they batter down Japanese cities, 
and are even now stretching out their hands for the 
occupation of Shang-hae. 

The policy of such men, animated by the two 
crudest of all human passions, fear in the one case, 
and lust of gam in the other, it would seem difficult, 
although not hopeless, to resist. Faith m the higher 
attributes of human nature and of human society 
must mdeed be strong ; belief in the existence of men, 
or classes of men, untainted as yet by base motives, 
and regardmg all that has past with indignation deep 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 431 

aiid fervent, yet silent from the consciousness of iso- 
lation ; belief above all in the mighty powers of good 
latent, yet ever present, in the inheritance of the Past ; 
such belief must be firm indeed to sustain so peril- 
ous a " wrestle with the darkness of this world, with 
spiritual wickedness in high places." Such faith, such 
tranquil, firm conviction. Positivism supplies. 

For nothing less than a total change, moral and 
intellectual, in our whole manner of reo-ardino; other 
populations, whether Western or Oriental, will meet 
the necessities of the case. The theory of the in- 
trinsic superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race and of 
Anglo- Saxon civilisation to all other civilisations 
and races, must be uprooted and abandoned. We 
must learn to recognise that we form but a part of 
the commonwealth of Western nations. The feeling 
of Occidentality, analogous and superior to the feeling 
which obtained in the Middle Ages, when Western 
Europe acknowledged one and the same Catholic 
faith, must again resume its sway over feelings of 
nationality and patriotism, not destroying these, but 
controlling and purifying them. And while this 
must be our attitude towards the West, no less radi- 
cal a change must be wrought in our feeling and 
our action with regard to the East. For feelings of 
dislike, contempt, and cruelty, must be substituted, 
not merely benevolence and ]3ity, but also a large 
measure of admiration and respect. The Oriental 
represents types of civilisation in which we ourselves 
were moulded centuries or tens of centuries ago. 
He is, as it were, the visible incarnation of the Past 
of Europe, from which its Present has sprung in un- 
broken filiation. Yet this, though a sufficient stimu- 
lus to our sympathy, is not all. The more elaborate 



432 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

and complex development of the West has, as I have 
pointed out, not been attained without loss. In 
striving for a higher type of life, the harmony of 
the ancient type has been disturbed. Our vigorous 
analysis has disclosed new powers, but the very 
conception of balancing these powers in a synthesis 
equally harmonious, and more aspiring than the old, 
has but very recently arisen. To those who would 
realise this conception, who appreciate the great and 
imminent problem of reconciling law with liberty, 
independence with cooperation, order with progress, 
the study of the ancient order as still visible in the 
East, is invaluable. The Oriental regards the West 
with fear, but he regards it also with disdain. The 
physical power resulting from our intellectual agility 
is to him as the magic of the sorcerer, a source of 
miserable trepidation and anxiety. Let it not be 
supposed that with his fear, admiration and respect 
are mingled. The political restlessness of Western 
society, its absence of restraint, its readiness to sacri- 
fice every moral or religious consideration to commer- 
cial motives, have long ago been appreciated in the 
East with silent or contemptuous wonder. Mutual 
respect can alone fill the vast gulf between the East 
and West. It is for the West to take the first step. 

No less a change than this wiU suffice to rege- 
nerate our Oriental policy. There are indeed men 
in our legislature, men with hearts and minds too 
large for the shackles of a somewhat narrow political 
creed, who attack our present Oriental policy, on 
lower and, as it might seem to some, more practical 
grounds. In the important parliamentary debate of 
1st June 1864, Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright prove 
very conclusively that the result of the violence that 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 433 

has been used in opening np China to British trade 
has in no respect justified those efibrts even from the 
financial point of view. Mr. Cobden by the simplest 
statistics shows that, while the exports of British 
commodities to the rest of the world have in a very 
few years more than doubled, our exports to China, 
the population of which is one-third of the human 
race, form only 2^ per cent of the total amount, 
" not having kept pace with the natural increase of 
our trade in other directions."* Mr. Bright re- 
marks truly enough, that our " trade mth China for 
many years back, for thirty years, has not left one 
farthing of profit" (he was speaking of the export 
trade from England to China), " if you pay out of it 
the cost of the war, the intermeddling, and the mili- 
tary and naval force which is now apparently per- 
manently established there; there are fifty ships of 
war for the protection of an export trade of less than 
4,000,000/. a year." 

Unquestionable as these statements are, it is im- 
possible not to feel the weakness of the ground for 
attack thiis taken ; and Mr. Cobden himself seemed 
to feel its weakness. 

" It might have happened," he says, " that with a great sacrifice 
of national character we might have achieved great success in our 
commercial undertakings with China. I confess for my own part 
that I should not be disposed to consider a satisfactory balance 
in the national ledger as suJB&cient to condone a course of con- 
duct which I thought inimical to the national character. I am 
sorry to say, however, that the most unsatisfactory feature in our 
relations with China is the commercial question" 

* The figures so disingenuously brought forward by Mr. Layard 
and Lord Palmerston in reply, included the imports of opium, which 
previous to 1857 had not been legahsed, and had therefore not been 
included in the imports. The value of the opium imported is more 
than twice that of British manufactures. 



434 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

Until men like Mr. Cobclen and Mr. Bright reverse 
the order of precedence which they give to these two 
unsatisfactory features of our Chinese policy, their 
eloquence, more specious though it may appear, and 
serviceable as it unquestionably has been, will lose 
half its real weio^ht. And notwithstandino; the sneers 
levelled at the Manchester school, these two men, of 
all our politicians, are perhaps the best prepared to 
do so.* 

Let us then apply the principles that have been 
laid down in this essay to the formation of a practical 
policy. 

The policy of Chinese statesmen during the last 
three centuries has been, as we have seen, total 
prohibition or restriction within the narrowest limits 
of intercourse with the West. The censure with 
which this policy has been regarded, is, as we have 
seen, wholly unjustified. The buccaneering spirit 
which every Western nation has shown in its dealings 
with Oriental nations fully justified it. But wise as 
the policy of non-intercourse may have been, it is im- 
possible now to restore it in its integrity. The mag- 
nitude of the commercial interests at stake is such 
that it would not be practicable, even if desirable, to 
annihilate the trade with China ; and perhaps if prac- 
ticable, yet not desirable. What is urgently needed is 
to place Western intercourse with China under restric- 
tions which, while not incompatible with a steady and 
moderate increase of trade, shall enable us to exercise 
a strong and peremptory control over the lawlessness 
of Western subjects, and which shall prove to the 
Chinese that our* relations with them will be for the 

* It is hardly necessary to remark that this was written before 
Mr. Cobden's death. 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 435 

future raised to the standard of international morality 
which has long been recognised in the West. 

1. The first principle, then, of the policy I propose 
is recurrence to the Nankin treaty of 1842 ; cession, 
that is to say, of the additional rights extorted by 
the iniquitous war of 1857-1860; restriction of our 
commercial relations to the five ports of Canton, 
Amoy, Ningpo, Foo-chow, and Shanghai. It might 
be questionable whether the first of these ports should 
be retained, unless it is found that the bitter feeling 
aroused by the wars of 1842 and 1858 has in great 
part subsided. In any case, however, the right of 
demanding passports to travel in the interior should 
be given up; and those who venture upon inland 
excursions should be considered to place themselves 
wholly beyond the pale of British protection. Above 
all, the settlement at Han- chow, and the whole navi- 
gation of the Yang-tse-kiang, should be abandoned; 
no clause in our treaties with China having by the 
confession of almost every one of our political agents 
produced greater disorder and confusion than this.* 

*' On this point I quote the unimpeacliable authority of Mr. Ad- 
kins, the Yice-Consul at Chin-kiang. Writing on April 27, 1863, he 
says : " I very much fear that the foreigners trading on this river in 
sailing-boats are almost without exception men witliout principle or cha- 
racter ^ outlaws^ infact^ ivho have no regard for treaties or regulations, 
and loho looJc on the Chinese as made for them to prey upon. Their 
drunken and debauched habits have made an impression even on the 
Chinese." And when our vessels of war have attempted to take upon 
themselves the function of police, they have only made matters worse, 
as in the case already detailed of Mr. Caldwell at Hong-Kong. To take 
one instance out of many : in the autumn of 1862, some British gun- 
boats took upon themselves to destroy three Chinese vessels at Lang- 
shan (a creek on the river), on the ground that " respectable villagers"^ 
had informed them that they were pirates. They turned out after- 
wards to be vessels of war belonging to the Chinese government ; and 
the respectable villagers were very likely men of the class of Mr, Cald- 
well and Ma-chow- wong. See Parliamentary Papers relating to China, 
(1864), pp. 57, 149. 



436 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

2. Even at the treaty ports, the right of exter- 
ritoriality, the right, that is, of trying British offen- 
ders against Chinese subjects by British instead of 
by Chinese law, should be abandoned as wholly in- 
compatible with the very foundations on which all 
international law rests. Besides its own inherent 
injustice, it involves of course the establishment by 
each Western nation of its own tribunal ; a state of 
things which renders the repression of Western crime 
practically impossible. The difficulties which the 
abandonment of this right might raise, would be 
met in a spirit of conciliation on both sides ; a spirit 
which Chinese statesmen would not be slow to ex- 
hibit if initiated on our side by such measures as 
I have alluded to. Mixed tribunals of Chinese and 
Western officials might be formed ; the rules of cri- 
minal procedure and the scale of punishments being 
settled by our ambassador at Pekin, or by special 
plenipotentiaries.^ 

3. The next feature of our policy should be total 
suppression, so far as depends upon ourselves, of the 
opium traffic. Illegal till 1858, legalised then by the 
strong pressure which Lord Elgin brought to bear, 
and by the painful experience which the Chinese 
had received that we would not allow of any effica- 
cious steps to be taken for its suppression; it is al- 
most the only portion of our trade which shows a 
steady increase. It is upheld on the ground of its 
utility to Indian finance, and as a check upon the 
flow of silver that would otherwise take place from 

* The excessive objection entertained to the residence of an am- 
bassador at Pekin would in all probability cease ; and it would not be 
long before embassies would be sent to Europe. But to force ambas- 
sadors upon coiu-ts unwilling to receive them is as foolish as it is 
immoral. 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 437 

Europe in payment for Chinese commodities. Against 
the principles here advocated, that is to say, on 
principles of the plainest, simplest morality, neither 
of these grounds has the smallest validity. The 
opium trade must be given up, as the slave trade 
was given up, not on principles of profit and loss, 
but on principles of right and wrong. It is pos- 
sible, and indeed very probable, that its abandonment 
will enable Chinese tradesmen and mechanics to be- 
come larger purchasers of British manufactures; but 
whether this be so or not, the call of duty, fidelity 
to which is often assumed to be with Englishmen 
exceptionally strong, is in either case the same. By 
all practicable means, both by suppression of its 
growth in India (which, since opium is a govern- 
ment monopoly, would be at least as easy as the 
prohibition of tobacco in England), and by affording 
the Chinese government every facility for prevent- 
ing its importation at the treaty ports, we should co- 
operate in the extinction of a gigantic evil, which is 
in very great part of our own creation. 

4. By far the greatest practical difiiiculty in pre- 
serving peaceable relations with China is the lawless 
character of Western traders. No words of mine on 
this subject, no reproaches of the Chinese authorities 
themselves, can be stronger than the language em- 
ployed by almost every one of our own political agents 
during the last thirty years. Elliott, Mitchell, Alcock, 
Adkins, Bruce, all tell the same tale, and all allow that 
the evil is increasing. It is urgently necessary, then, 
that some decisive effort shall be made by all the 
Western Powers, conjointly with the Chinese govern- 
ment, to repress piracy in the Chinese seas. For one 
Power like England to take such measures upon her- 



438 " ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

self only leads, as lias been shown in the case of 
Hong-kong, and in the numerous cases that have 
recently occurred on the Yang-tse river, to an ex- 
tension of the original evil. 

5. To all these measures, destined for the double 
purpose of repressing actual evils, and of convincing 
the Chinese government of the friendly spirit and of 
the regard for international law with which our rela- 
tions with her are henceforth to be conducted, one 
further measure should be added. The money ex- 
torted after the wars of 1842 and 1858 should be re- 
paid. Our Oriental policy is degrading our standard 
of military morality with fearful rapidity. In the en- 
gagement in the straits of Simonosaki, a few months 
ago, we demanded money for having abstained from 
the atrocious outrage of burning down a defenceless 
and unoffending town. It is time that such proced- 
lu'e should be held up in its true light, as the merest 
buccaneering. The opium war, and the war in de- 
fence of the pirate Arrow, being by common confes- 
sion indefensible, the payment exacted for the expense 
incurred and for the destroyed opium must simply 
be regarded as unlawful plunder. 

The changed state of opinion from which alone, 
as I have said, the adoption of such a policy is to 
be expected will not, I imagine, be propagated very 
readily among the governing classes of this country, 
whether feudal or commercial. jNTor is it to them 
that I appeal; except it be to remark on the extreme 
recklessness and folly of the course which is being 
actually pursued. Without definite plan or purpose 
we are drifting into political complications in China, 
from which it will be difficult to extricate ourselves 
without disaster or diso-race. Those who look for- 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 439 

ward to the conquest of China should at least take 
the trouble to measure the marked superiority in 
physical and moral energy which separates the Chi- 
nese from most other Oriental races. " It mis^ht be 
inferred," says Captain Brine, himself engaged in ac- 
tive military service in Chinese waters, "that China is 
destined to fall under the rule of one of the Western 
Powers, and become governed in the same manner as 
British India. Any one acquainted with the Chinese 
people will at once acknowledge the extreme impro- 
bability of this result." 

But for hio'her and in the end strono^er motives 
than those of political timidity or mercantile avarice, 
I would appeal to the working classes of this country 
whether they are prepared to see the national honour 
stained, the blood of our soldiers and sailors shed, the 
heavy burden of taxation yet more heavily weighted 
in such a cause as this? Whether it compensates for 
the English flag borne hj pirates, for English men- 
of-war burning dovfn defenceless cities, defending a 
trade in poison, and scattermg anarchy and degrada- 
tion through a vast empire, that the customs' duties 
should increase, or that another province should be 
added to our dominion? The strong sympathies 
which the working classes of this country have shown 
for the nobler cause in the American struggle, and 
that while it was the urgent interest of so large a 
portion of them that the side patronised by the mer- 
cantile and the aristocratic classes should triumph, 
gives ground for hoping that in Oriental policy their 
sympathies when enlightened will not be less vigor- 
ous or noble. 

There is a section of society in all classes from 
whom better things might be expected. Those with 



440 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

whom sincere and heartfelt adherence to the estab- 
lished faith of this country is paramount over all 
other considerations, and who pass commonly under 
the designation of the religious world, form a body, 
diminishing indeed daily in numbers, diminishing still 
more visibly in intellectual power and influence, yet 
still wielding a practical authority which has not 
entirely passed away into the phantom of prestige. 
The principles of such men do not spring from ava- 
rice, political ambition, or national vanity. That 
England should dictate to all the weaker nations, or 
that her cotton-spinners should find or force all the 
markets of the world, is not to them an object of 
such transcendent importance as to drown all con- 
siderations of humanity and justice. They are 
swayed by feelings larger and deeper than patriot- 
ism. They wish the highest good, the spiritual wel- 
fare of other nations as well as of their own. How 
is it then, that against a series of iniquities so fla- 
grant, against so brutal an abuse of physical force, 
the Christian Church, I speak not of the ofiicial 
Church merely, but of all denommations in England, 
has hardly raised one audible protest? 

The answer is to be found in the narrow and un- 
real basis on which the system of the Church rests. 
Concentrating the thoughts of her disciples on a 
future life, she has complicated and weakened the 
action of those of them who are sincere upon a 
world which they are taught to be wholly wicked, 
and in which they are warned to consider themselves 
as not citizens but pilgrims. No one will attempt to 
modify what he is convinced ought altogether to be 
rejected. He who sincerely believes that human 
nature is utterly corrupt, and that "works done be- 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 441 

fore justification partake of the nature of sin," can- 
not possibly feel any real sympathy with states of 
society into which his own doctrine, the sole means 
of avoiding eternal ruin, has not penetrated. Conse- 
quently, however little the consistent Catholic or 
Protestant may be disposed to approve English po- 
licy towards Eastern nations, he has the strongest mo- 
tive for conniving at it, as the possible means of intro- 
ducing Christianity among them. Not that he would 
himself do evil that good might come ; but, in his eyes, 
the evil is finite and temporary, the good infinite and 
eternal. It is hard for him to feel any permanent 
indignation, it is wholly impossible for him to exer- 
cise any efi*ectual efibrts against military aggression 
which, however unjustifiable, seems yet to him the 
destined path of Providence, by which the souls of 
Hindoos and Chinese are to be saved from ruin. 
Thus it is that Christian doctrine consistently inter- 
preted has not only tolerated but has gone far to 
sanction some of the most flagrant political crimes in 
modern history. The expulsion of the Moors from 
Spain, the medieval persecution of the Jews, the de- 
struction of the Mexican and Peruvian empire, are 
instances of this, and are only less disgraceful than 
our Chinese wars, because in the strange combination 
of political and religious motives, if the avarice was 
equally shameless, yet the enthusiasm for the spread 
of the faith was incomparably more real. 

I have been speaking of those who interpreted 
the doctrines mth strict logical consistency; for I 
would be the last to ignore the noble inconsistencies 
of a long series of Christian heroes and martyrs, like 
St. Bernard, Las Casas, and Wilberforce, who have 
played their part in the world, not as pilgrims reject- 



442 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

ing it, but as citizens accepting and reforming it. 
The mediaeval Church in its best times rose above 
its doctrine, and became the practical and social re- 
novator of Western Europe. To numberless Chris- 
tian philanthropists of later times similar praise is to 
be given. Still the fact remains that consistent in- 
terpretation of the doctrine is frequently an obstacle 
to international justice ; and the very slave-trade was 
palliated by many ministers of religion as a means of 
bringing heathen within the pale of Christianity. 

We cannot act rightly towards nations whose 
phase of civilisation differs from our own, unless we 
are prepared to understand that phase, and to yield 
it the due measure of sympathy and respect. To 
effect this result is one of the highest purposes of the 
Positivist theory of the history of man. By explain- 
ing the links which precede and lead up to our own 
stage of civilisation, it prepares us for recognising in 
each of the extra-European societies around us the ana- 
logue of some one of our o^vn ancestral phases. We 
are thus no longer an isolated exception, a "peculiar 
people," endowed with exceptional gifts which dis- 
pense us from dealing in strict justice with less ad- 
vanced nations. We are brought into union, into 
kinship with them. We sympathise with their diffi- 
culties ; we reverence the great men who have striven 
to surmount them; and we look forward to the time 
when they shall recognise our fellowship as we al- 
ready recognise theirs, and when they shall con- 
sciously unite with ourselves in the communion of 
all countries and all ages, knit together by a common 
faith, by the Keligion of Humanity. 

JOHN HENEY BEIDG^ES. 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 443 

Npte on the Effects of Opium^ p. 344. 

It might seem a waste of argument to famish proof of statements 
so obvious as these. But Leibnitz has said that if it happened 
to be the interest or the supposed interest of men to believe that 
two and two made five, it would be extremely difficult to convince 
them of their error. It is the interest, or the supposed interest, 
of the Indian Government to derive a reyenue of from five to 
eight millions from the sale of opium to China. Every sophistry 
is therefore used to persuade the public of what every medical 
man in Em-ope knows to be false, that opium, in quantities of a 
few grains daily, is not injurious to health; and on the basis of 
that falsehood to found the inference, that if its excess be hurt- 
ful, that is no more than may be said of the abuse of alcoholic 
liquor; that its prohibition by G-overnment would stand there- 
fore on the same footing as the prohibition of wine, beer, and 
spnits, demanded by the supporters of the Maine liquor law, but 
condemned by most reasonable men on the ground that the abuse 
of a thing is no argument against its use. I say then, first, that 
every medical man in Europe knows that whereas the use of beer 
or wine in small quantities is in most cases not injurious, the con- 
stant use even of small doses of opium, except in certain cases of 
disease, is injurious exceedingly. Secondly, whereas beer or wine 
can easily be taken in moderation. Like tea or cofPee, from year to 
year, without increasing the quantity, opiuni cannot. It requires 
constant increase to produce its pleasurable effects. This is a 
practical distinction of the greatest moment. In large manufac- 
turing towns especially, where mothers of families work in fac- 
tories, the physician sees its baneful effects on children to whom 
it is given by the hired nurse. The dose must be constantly in- 
creased. Two drops of laudanum, that is, one-tenth of a grain of 
opium, are enough to kill an infant of a month old. But under 
the sedulous ministrations of the nurse, a dose of sixty drops, 
equal to three full doses for an adult, is at last tolerated and de- 
manded. In Bradford the rate of mortality for all classes is high, 
25 to 28 per 1000, as compared with the average in the community 
of 22. But the mortality of children under five years is out of 
proportion even to that high standard, 230 per 1000, as compared 
with the general English rate of 150. This I know from personal 
experience to be largely due to opium. But it would be entirely 
en'oneous to measure the mischievous effects of opium merely or 



444 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

mainly by its effect in shortening life. Xor is it on the intellec- 
tual faculties that its worst evils primarily and directly fall. It 
is the manhood, the energy, the will, the concentration of purpose 
that in the first place are attacked and undermined. The life-long 
suicide of Coleridge and De Quincey is painful eyidence of this. 

I need not say that in the consensus of our nature morale and 
physique are inextricably bound together ; and that this moral 
degradation is accompanied or followed by physical suffering. 
" Among the symptoms that present themselyes," says Dr. Med- 
hurst, quoting from a medical report, " are griping pains in the 
bowels, pain in the limbs, loss of appetite, so that the smoker 
can only eat dainty food, disturbed sleep, and general emacia- 
tion. The outward appearances are, sallowness of the com- 
plexion, bloodless cheeks and lips, sunken eye with a dark circle 
round the eyelids, and altogether a haggard countenance. There 
is a peculiar appearance in the face of a smoker not noticed in 
any other condition; the skin assumes a pale waxy appearance, 
and as if all the fat were remoyed from beneath the skin. The 
hollows of the countenance, the eyelids, root of the ala nasi, fis- 
sure and corners of lips, depression at the angle of the jaw, temples, 
&c., take on a peculiar dark appearance, not like that resulting 
from various chronic diseases, but as if some dark matter were 
deposited beneath the skin. There is also a fulness and protru- 
sion of the lips, arising perhaps from the continued use of the 
large mouth-piece peculiar to the opium pipe. In fine, a confirmed 
opium smoker presents a most melancholy appearance, haggard, 
dejected, with a lack-lustre eye, and a slovenly, weakly, and 
feeble gait."* And if these evils are supposed exceptional, 
read the following description of our own native Coolie force 
in China, written by one of its English officers. " They all 
behaved well under fire, and some of them did acts that would 
have given the Victoria Cross to any Englishman, had he 
done the same. Their powers of endurance are wonderful ; I have 
known them work hard in a hot sun for ten or twelve hours, and 
not grumble when they saw that a certain amount of work had to 
be done. They drink very little ; they are great hands at lan- 
guages ; . . . . their great lane is opium ; and I do not thinlc it is 
possible for any of them who have taJcen it to give it up; consequently 
dy the time they are forty years of age they are oldmeny^ 

* Papers relating to the Opium-Trade in China, 1842-1856, p. 56. 
-j- Brine's Taeping Eebellion, p. 152. 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 445 

Extracts from Memorandum hy Mr, Alcoch {noiv SirR, 
Alcock)^ contained in Parliamentary Pa'pers relative 
to LordElgin^s Mission o/1857, pp. 55-61. 

"To eyery privilege gained" (in our intercourse with China), 
" the first difiiculty haying been surmounted, another and often a 
greater has appeared, lying fall in the way between the privilege 
and our enjoyment of its legitimate fruit. Almost invariably it 
has taken the shape of some evil or abuse attaching to the exer- 
cise of our acquired rights. And as the inseparable condition of 
such a state of things, one alternative, and one only, has been 
offered, written very plainly, as may now be seen, however it 
may have been overlooked or disregarded at the time, and it was 
this, either such abuses and evils must be grappled with and 
mastered, or the best frait be relinquished, with insecure tenure 
of the rest. To decline the contest was to accept the penalties of 
defeat; and as it has ever been, so it is now. 

"The access to the inner waters and great inland marts of 
Chinese produce, with the promise of new and important advan- 
tages, brings a menace of new dangers of corresponding magni- 
tude in the extension of a chronic evil, which has been disastrous 
to our position and interests in China. The worthless character 
of a numerous gathering of foreigners of all nations, under no effec- 
tive control, is a national reproach as well as a public calamity. 
They dispute the field of commerce with honester men, and convert 
privileges of access and trade into means of fraud and violence. 
In this career of license, unchecked by any fear of their own 
government, and protected in a great degree by treaties from the 
action of the native authorities, the Chinese are the first and 
greatest, but by no means the only sufferers. There is no govern- 
ment or nation of the great European family that does not suffer 
in character, and in so far as they have any interests at stake 
in China, in these also both immediately and prospectively. 

" One of the principal objects of our treaty was relief from 
cohongs and monopolies, with vexatious and arbitrary taxes on 
trade. A system of maritime customs under the check of con- 
sular authorities was the remedy. But this gain brought with 
it an attendant evil. Foreign merchants launched into a whole- 
sale system of smuggling and fraudulent devices for the evasion 
of duties. Chinese laws and treaty-stipulations were alike disre- 



446 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

garded ; sometimes by forcible infraction of port regulations, 
oftener by bribery and collusion. Some of the promised advan- 
tages of enlarged facilities of trade were lost to ns by such 
courses, and beyond all doubt a new class of obstacles has been 
created 

" Exemjjtion from territorial jurisdiction was a great step in 
advance ; but it too brought with it an evil progeny. Contempt 
for all Chinese authority, and disregard of inherent rights, ha- 
bitual infraction of treaty stipulations, license and violence wher- 
ever the offscum of the European nations found access and peace- 
able people to plunder; such were the first-fruits of this important 
concession, and time only served to increase their growth. . . 
. . . If gross abuse of foreign flags, and the immunities tliey 
gave ly treaty, had not leen haMtual and matters of notoriety, es- 
;peciaTly in the class of lorcha vessels, smugglers and pirates all, 
the particular ground of quarrel in ivhich the Canton difficulty legan 
would never have arisen. 

"In reference to open violence, and the license enjoyed by 
desperadoes and lawless persons on the coast of China, either 
foreigners in the proper sense of the term, or sailing in piratical 
vessels under foreign flags, it is desirable to show how nearly 
identical the prevailing evils are with those recorded in the past, 
and what these led to after a few years. 

" It is just three centuries ago since Simon Andrade and 
Fernando Mendez Pinto, both Portuguese, sailed up the Chinese 
coast, ostensibly for traffic in the north, where a flourishing trade 
and foreign settlements had already been established at Amoy, 
Ningpo, and Japan even, on the Island of Formosa and else- 
where. After plundering the tombs of seventeen kings of an 
ancient dynasty, in which treasure had been buried, and making 
many piratical expeditions from Mngpo as a base of operations, 
they drew dp\"VTi upon them the vengeance of the surrounding 
population, which rose upon them en masse, destroying not only 
their fleet of 37 vessels, but 800 resident Portuguese, and 12,000 
Christians, it is averred. Thus terminated all relations of trade 
and amity with foreigners at the northern ports until 1843 ; these 
events having taken place about 1545. From that date all inter- 
course was restricted to the most southern point of the empire 
and a single port. 

" It is scarcely three months ago since accounts were received 
of a combined attack made by the Ningpo people, who had called 



ENGLAND AND CHINA. 447 

in the aid of yessels manned by Cantonese, on a large fleet of 
piratical lorchas, nnder the Portuguese flag and manned by Por- 
tuguese chiefly, who had long been the terror and the pest of 
the contiguous coast, and even of the city of Ningpo itself, by 
their exactions and violence. All who could not escape were 
massacred ; many were pursued on shore and their vessels seized. 
One cannot help being struck with the close analogy between 
these two events, so widely separated in time, so similar in cause 
and results, and each taking place at the same port. 

" The governments of Europe have yet to learn the magnitude 
of the danger their interests are continually incurring, not from 
the incidents of a civil war, or the inherent perversity of the 
Chinese race, but from the absence of all due control in China 
over the natives of every country in Europe and America, and 
the indifference with which all the evils resulting from unre- 
strained license continue to be regarded even by the treaty 
Powers. 

" Ifc is only by general concurrence, active or passive, on the 
part of Western Powers, that any effective steps can be taken to 
apply a remedy. If the treaty Powers for instance, all who have 
interests of commerce, civilisation, or religion at heart, will put 
their hands to the work, a strong check will easily be established, 
and some concerted action with the Chinese government would 
only be necessary, assuming the acquiescence of other Western 
Powers, to give complete effect to measures well calculated to 
prevent continuous or gross abuses on the part of any foreigners." 



Chinese Moral Standard. 

(Note on p. 353.) 

Dr. Eennie, speaking of the confidence reposed by Chinamen 
in English merchants says : " This commercial confidence and 
payment of money in advance, is fully reciprocated by the prin- 
cipal foreign merchants in China, who are in the habit of intrust- 
ing large sums of money to Chinamen to go up into the tea and 
silk districts and make purchases for them, having no other secu- 
rity than their confidence in the men's integrity ; and to the credit 
of this class of the Chinese, I never heard of a case in which it 



448 ENGLAND AND CHINA. 

was abused ; but on the contrary have heard English merchants 
say, that they haye frequently placed pecuniary trusts in the 
hands of Chinamen, that they would not have done under similar 
circumstances in the hands of their own countrymen." PeMn 
and the Pehmgese, Yol. i. p. 300. 

Examination of the myths propagated so sedulously as to 
female infanticide in China leads to the belief that the crime 
is probably not quite so common as in England. That will 
certainly be the impression derived from study of the Jesuit 
memoirs, written by men who had such ample opportunities 
of minute observation. Dr. Eennie quotes facts which "argue 
strongly against the current belief that girls are ill-treated in 
China." " Of the correctness of this belief," he adds, " I have 
never myself been able to find a shadow of proof, but the con- 
trary." Yol. ii. p. 3. 

With regard to the kindliness of the Chinese disposition, an 
anecdote of Dr. Eennie's is worth quoting: "We have had, in 
a small way, an illustration of that remarkable absence of selfish- 
ness, and that desire to benefit relatives, which are among the 
prominent characteristics of the Chinese nature. Mr. Mofl&t's 
servant, a native of Tien-tsin, about fourteen years of age, refused 
at first to go with him so far from home as Nu-che-wang, but 
ultimately consented to do so on the condition of having his 
wages doubled for the two months that he was to be away, and 
paid in advance, also that a sheep-skin coat should be given him. 
On Mr. Moffit paying him the amount in advance, namely, twelve 
dollars, he divided it between his two married brothers, and 
would not keep a single dollar for himself, saying that his bro- 
thers required them and he did not." 

These are no isolated instances. The Jesuit missionaries of 
the last century, men who were not blinded by mercantile nor 
even by religious animosities, narrate abundant examples of the 
same kind. 



No. VI. 



ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 



BY 



CHARLES A. COOKSOK 



GG 



ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 



I, 

In a survey of tlie position of himself and the other 
foreign ministers at Jeclclo in 1861, Sir E. Alcock, 
after nearly two years' residence there, uses the fol- 
lowing language :* 

"Life was insecure; trade was being daily restricted, and no 
remonstrance, protest, or argnment, within the scope of diplo- 
matic means, had hitherto much availed to turn the authorities 
from a policy, the manifest tendency of which was to nullify the 
treaties, restrict all intercourse, and ultimately revert to the 
former state of isolation by the expulsion of foreigners. To 
make trade unprofitable by restrictions, extortions, and prohi- 
bitions, imposed on their own people with whom their power is 
absolute, render life not only so insecure, but intolerable in the 
conditions of residence, that no foreigner would long submit or 
find such an existence endurable, seemed really to have been the 
chief object kept in view dming nearly two years. This was the 
summary of their policy; and if these milder measures failed, the 
bravo's sword for assassination was always in reserve, and held 
in ierrorem over the heads of intruders on their soil, to be resorted 
to, as occasion might serve, without ruth or scruple. Trade ham- 

* Capital of the Tycoon, vol. ii. p. 103. 



452 ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 

pered and manacled, national rights violated, with outrage to the 
flags, and without a hope of redress or amelioration, all with im- 
punity. This resume depicts the situation." 

This is, of course, an ex parte statement of charges 
against the Japanese Government, in which some 
allowance must be made for personal uneasiness and 
disappointment ; but on the whole it will hardly be 
thought that, from the writer's point of view, the pic- 
ture here presented of the difficulties which have 
met Western diplomatists in Japan is much exag- 
gerated. There can also be little ground for be- 
lieving that the position of affairs has since mate- 
rially altered or improved; indeed the whole series 
of subsequent events appears to be an illustration 
of the truth of Sir K. Alcock's description, and 
affords a striking contrast to the hopes which had 
previously been entertained of the success of the 
efforts to open the Japanese empire to commerce 
and free intercourse with the rest of the world. 
These hopes did not certainly appear, when they 
were first so generally expressed, to be without some 
reasonable foundation, nor was it to be wondered at 
that they then were eagerly embraced by the great 
body of the public. The general acquaintance even 
of well-informed Englishmen with the history and 
character of the Japanese empire was probably 
confined to a few facts, when the news of the suc- 
cessful attempt made by the government of the 
United States to open diplomatic relations in 1854 
directed general attention to the subject. The map 
of the world showed that an island empire as large 
as Great Britain, in a position as to conditions of 
climate inferior to none on the whole globe, and 
with a configuration of coast admirably adapted for 



ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 453 

maritime commerce, lies in the high road between 
America, China, and India. It was also known that 
the policy of the Japanese Government, which for 
two hundred years had excluded all foreigners (ex- 
cept a few Dutch merchants) from intercourse with 
the country, had not always prevailed ; but that 
the Portuguese, earliest here as elsewhere in their 
intercourse with Oriental nations, had been allowed 
for nearly a century full opportunities for com- 
merce and propagandism, and that their efforts in 
the latter direction had apparently been attended 
for a time with such extraordinary success among 
all orders of the people as to have provoked op- 
position from the government, and brought about a 
persecution the most bloody and the most effectual 
to be found in the records of missions. That the 
Japanese people were also possessed of a consi- 
derable amount of ingenuity and artistic skill was 
proved by such importations of their manufactures, 
especially of their lacquer -ware and porcelain, as 
reached Europe through the Dutch factory at Naga- 
saki. But probably it is no exaggeration to say 
that beyond this the popular knowledge of Japan 
hardly extended. Whatever else was thought of 
the country and its inhabitants was probably de- 
rived from its supposed similarity to China, with 
which its civilisation, government, and religion were 
generally confounded. Much more than this was 
no doubt to be learned by those who cared to 
give time and attention to the subject; but this 
information, it was generally supposed, in the lan- 
guage of the writer who has done more .to popu- 
larise the subject of Japan than any other Enghsh- 
man, was attainable only through " huge tomes and 



454 . ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 

ponderous volumes, wrapt in quaint language and 
mouldy learning."* None, therefore, but the student 
of geography or ethnology felt called upon to disinter 
the facts ; although in reality almost all that was then 
known of Japan was contained in two volumes of the 
English translation of Engelbert K^mpfer's History 
of J Clip an^ a work which, for its lucid arrangement, 
scientific accuracy of observation, sound judgment, 
and careful industry, is scarcely excelled by any con- 
tribution to ethnology. 

But the real cause of the general ignorance of 
Englishmen as to Japan and its people, no doubt, was 
to be found in the apparent absence of practical value 
in the investigation. The literary interest attached 
to the subject of the Chinese and their civilisation, 
owing to its supposed bearing on the metajDhysical 
religious controversies of the eighteenth century, 
and the a jjriori theories of Yoltaire and Montes- 
quieu as to the origin of society, had almost entirely 
died out in this country. This interest had never 
extended to Japan ; and those whom the more 
active stimulus of commercial enterprise led to turn 
their eyes in that direction were repelled by the 
prospect before them. They saw that their first 
ventures must be attended with far more than 
the usual risks of early traders. They found that 
the law which excluded all foreign vessels from the 
ports of Japan was carried out with such consis- 
tent severity that more than one crew of adven- 
turers had suffered rigorous captivity. The various 
attempts, too, made since the expulsion of the Por- 
tuguese by the Governments of England, the United 
States, and Russia, to enter into international re- 

■^ Osborne, JajKmese Fragments, p. 5. 



ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 455 

lations, had hitherto proved complete failures. The 
Dutch, the only nation whose merchants had any 
practical acquaintance with Japan, were themselves, 
no doubt, from the lengthened experience of their 
own position of isolation at Decima, thoroughly con- 
vinced of the hopelessness of any attempt to re- 
lax the rigid system of Japanese policy. And they 
maybe excused if they showed little disposition either 
to underrate the difficulties of a task which they had 
so utterly failed in accomplishmg, or to assist towards 
the introduction of rivals in the petty monopoly of 
trade, which they preserved for themselves only on 
the most humiliating terms of submission. 

Against such obstacles it was evident that all 
private attempts m^ust be abortive. It was only by 
the action of the Government of one or more of the 
Western Powers that there could be any hopes of 
breaking down the barriers of exclusion. And it was 
not till very recently that any serious effort had been 
made by any of them. Three only of the great Powers 
had had any direct interest in the question of Japan. 
Kussia, from her geographical position and the large 
views which she has always taken of Oriental policy, 
was the most intimately connected with the destinies 
of the fertile country of forty million of industrious 
inhabitants; to whom, by her recent acquisitions of 
territory, she is become almost the nearest neighbour. 
The American Republic could never be indifferent to 
her share m trade and intercourse with a country 
which lies immediately on the ocean high-road from 
California to China and India. Nor could the world- 
wide commercial interests of England allow her to 
lag behind in the race for trade; and her con- 
nection with China gave a special stimulus to the 



456 ENGLAlsD AND JAPAN. 

enterprise of her merchants in that quarter of the 
globe. Yet the efforts which each of these nations 
had made to obtain either access to the harbours of 
Japan or Hberty of commerce with the people had 
hitherto met with no success : but they had been very 
faint, and generally very ill-directed ; and if their aim 
had been better, in no instance had either the discre- 
tion or the skill of those intrusted with so delicate a 
task deserved a better fate. When, therefore, the 
triumphant official narrative of the American expe- 
dition under Commander Perr}^, in the spring of 
1854, announced to the world that the first advance 
had been made towards bringing Japan mto relation 
with the rest of the world, the previous failures and 
difficulties were easily glossed over or forgotten, and 
those sanguine hopes were excited to which the pic- 
ture drawn by Sir R. Alcock affords so discouraging 
a contrast. It is true that the first treaty concluded 
with the Tycoon conceded to the Americans nothing 
but access to two remote and unimportant harbours, 
for the purpose only of victualling and refitting their 
vessels, with the privilege of residence for a consul at 
one of them. But the recognition of any interna- 
tional rights in foreigners by the Japanese Govern- 
ment was so great an innovation in their national 
policy that it was not unreasonably believed that 
other and more important advantages might soon be 
achieved. The Crimean war immediately following 
had the effect of directing still closer attention to the 
relations of the West with Eastern Asia, as an im- 
portant branch of that great "Eastern Question'^ 
which Russia had long been silently endeavouring 
to solve in her own way. It was felt how important 
it was for the Western allies not only to possess in 



ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 457 

Japan stations for their fleets in those stormy seas, 
but also to prevent the Japanese archipelago falling 
into the grasp of the Empire which was already ex- 
tendino^ its oriaantic arms over the continent on either 
side of those islands. Meanwhile the Americans 
were improving the advantage given them by the 
residence of their consul at Samoda, in urging on the 
Japanese Government the benefits of an extension of 
the privileges already granted to them. The resist- 
ance to these demands for the opening of ports and 
a treaty of commerce might have been indefinitely 
prolonged, had not the tidings of the forcible dicta- 
tion of the treaty ofTien-tsin, in the summer of 1858, 
been so dextrously employed by the American Con- 
sul Mr. Harris as to obtain from the Tycoon further 
concessions. When Lord Elgin arrived immediately 
afterwards he found very little difiiculty in securing 
for Great Britain the terms which had been already 
obtained by Am^erica ; and these terms were afterwards 
extended without resistance to France, Russia, and 
Holland. 

Thus the anticipations of the more sanguine 
appeared already half realised ; and it was confi- 
dently believed that a field was now opened for the 
commerce and propagandism of the Western world, 
the riches of whose virgin soil would speedily begin 
to be gathered in by a numerous band of mer- 
chants and missionaries. Nor did these ideas want 
further confirmation from various sources. Reference 
was now made to the old accounts of the Japanese 
empire and people. Popular writers epitomised and 
extracted the facts contained in the works of Kaempfer, 
Siebold, Titsingh, and others, who, with true Teu- 
tonic patience and impartiality, had recorded the re- 



458 ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 

suits of much study and inquiry into the phenomena 
of the social, political, and religious life outside the 
Avails of their dull Dutch factory at Decima. And in 
the picture, always carefully drawn, but not always 
very lifelike, which their volumes present, much was 
found to wonder at and to praise. A densely-popu- 
lous and highly-cultivated country, with productions 
amply sufficient for every want of the population ; a 
government whose paternal despotism acknowledged 
the effectual restraint of unwritten traditions of jus- 
tice; and, finally, a people to whom destitution and 
disorder had for centuries been unknown, among 
whom education was universal, and whose increasing 
mdustry had not impaired their martial character. 
Well might Ksempfer, in a summary of the arguments 
on both sides of the question, whether the Japanese 
were well advised in their policy of isolation, incline 
to the conclusion that such a nation had more to lose 
than to gain by intercourse with the rest of the globe. 
And the letters and writmgs of the first Jesuit mis- 
sionaries were found, by those who had the patience 
to peruse them, to abound with testimony equally fa- 
vourable to the general character of those whose eager 
reception of Christianity had rendered its triumph 
apparently so rapid and so easy, and who, when per- 
secution broke out, had almost without an exce23tion 
preferred to surrender their lives rather than their 
faith. Nor did the accounts of the most recent tra- 
vellers exhibit any signs of a national deterioration. 
The narratives of those who accompanied the British 
and other foreign embassies teemed with enthusiastic 
praise of "this charming people," who to primitive 
simplicity added the most polished politeness and 
refinement, and whose industry and intelligence sur- 



ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 459 

passed that of the Chinese, while it was united with 
a chivalrous courage and a manly spirit of independ- 
ence such as is found in no other Oriental race. With 
such pictures before their eyes, what wonder if men 
looked forward with eager curiosity to the results 
which they expected would speedily follow the se- 
cond introduction of European civilisation into this 
singular country, under the more favourable auspices 
of modern commercial treaties and all the arts and 
sciences of the nineteenth century ? 

A comparison of these sanguine anticipations with 
the uniform tone of discouragement, almost amount- 
ing to despair, which pervades not only the work of 
Sir R. Alcock, but nearly every despatch sent home 
by the ministers in Japan, compels the conclusion 
either that the difficulties of their task had been 
greatly underrated, or that the negotiations which 
have produced such unfortunate results must have 
been altogether mismanaged. 

The result of our examination may not enable us 
wholly to exonerate the agents who have been em- 
ployed ; but the real causes of failure must be sought 
not in their personal errors and deficiencies, but in the 
policy which they have been instructed to carry out. 
Their task has been nothing less than to compel, by 
a mixture of intimidation and persuasion, the rulers 
of Japan to lend their active cooperation towards the 
promotion of an intercourse with the Western world, 
from which the history and traditions of the coun- 
try led them at the outset to expect nothing but 
national loss and misfortune, out of which they 
have hitherto experienced no fruits but those which 
they had anticipated, and in which they discern the 
menace of a speedy revolution, likely not only to 



460 ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 

be fatal to themselves and their authority, but to 
prove the certain precursor of universal social disor- 
ganisation. 

How far these fears of the Japanese rulers are well 
founded is certainly a practical question which our 
statesmen are bound to consider before they incur the 
responsibility of producing such a catastrophe. An as- 
sumption of even a protectorate of the government of 
Japan on the part of Great Jkitain, though conjointly 
with other Western Powers, is probably a solution of 
the difficulty for which the boldest advocates of a 
" spirited foreign policy" are not yet prepared. Yet 
there are not wanting indications that unless the 
policy of our ministers is closely watched we may be 
almost inextricably mixed up with the domestic dissen- 
sions of the country. And who, Avith the experiences 
of India and China fresh on his mind, can say what 
may be the next step which is pronounced inevit- 
able? It cannot therefore be superfluous to urge on 
public opinion any considerations which may tend 
to prevent our " drifting" into a position of which 
the danger is so serious. Vmt apart from this, it 
will, I hope, appear from the following pages that 
the policy hitherto pursued by Great Britain, while 
productive only of disaster to Japan, has brought no 
corres])onding advantages to ourselves, and that a 
persistence in the same course is likely to involve us 
in even more serious difficulties; in short, that the 
means employed by our diplomatists have been di- 
rectly calculated to frustrate even the short-sighted 
purposes which they have had in view. 

As I believe that the principal cause of the ill- 
advised measures hitherto taken by the English Go- 
vernment towards Japan has lain in an incapacity 



ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 461 

for estimating the true character of the civilisation 
vdih which they had to deal, in fact from a neglect 
of that relative method of political investigation 
which is the distinguishing feature of modern Posi- 
tive science, it will be necessary to say something 
on the general character and ciAalisation of the coun- 
try. These preliminary observations are intended, 
however, only to enable an ordinary Englishman 
in some degree to put himself in the right position 
for understanding the true character of the relations 
of the Japanese with the Western, as well as the place 
which they occupy in the Eastern world. 

In this connection a few observations on the dis- 
puted question as to the ethnological affinities of the 
population of Japan may possess something more 
than an ethnological interest. This is a point on 
which several different theories have been pro- 
pounded. But they need not detain us now. Ex- 
cepting the fanciful notion of Kiempfer as to the 
Babylonian origin of the Japanese, all these theories 
agree in referring them to some one of the races on 
the neighbouring islands or mainland, which would 
all be classed physiologically under that great branch 
of the human family of which the Mongol tribe has 
been chosen by ethnologists as the best-known and 
most strongly-marked type. The very features of 
difference observed by Siebold between ''the smaller, 
darker, crisper-haired, thicker-lipped maritime popu- 
lation of the island of Kiusiu," as distinguished from 
"the larger-framed, clearer-skinned agriculturists of 
the interior," point to this conclusion, which is strongly 
borne out by his detailed comparison of the Chinese 
and Japanese features. For these differences are 
only the same modifications of the general Mongol 



462 ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 

type, which are discernible throughout the various 
tribes which have now become so closely amalga- 
mated with the Chinese proper, under the influence 
of the institutions which they have adopted from that 
kindred race of conquerors from the north-eastern 
highlands of Thibet. There would therefore be no- 
thing in the physiological characteristics of the Japan- 
ese, always the least deceptive evidence of nationality, 
o]3posed to the earliest theory adopted by Europeans, 
which supposed them to be a colony from the main- 
land of China. The other, though far less trust- 
worthy species of physical evidence, that furnished 
by their language, certainly seems to point in an en- 
tirely different direction. Though the Japanese have 
adopted their written character from the Chinese 
ideographic alphabet, their language is undoubtedly 
quite distinct from that which has long been almost 
universal throughout China. It in fact belongs to 
quite a different family of speech from the Chinese, 
to which it bears hardly any resemblance either in 
structure, roots, syntax, or general sound. It is 
neither wholly monosyllabic, nor altogether without 
inflexions properly so called. Comparative philolo- 
gists are generally agreed in classing it under the 
great Turanian family, of which the main distinc- 
tion is its agglutinative stage of development, mid- 
way between the purely monosyllabic, aptote, Chinese 
and the rich growth of inflexions in the Aryan 
family.* 

* An examination of the Japanese (xrammar of MM. Curtius and 
Hoffman (in the French translation of M. Leon Pages) and of the 
Introduction a V etude, de la langue Japonaise of M. Rosny, as well as 
a very interesting paper by the same learned writer in the Journal 
Asiatique, appears to me (in my ignorance of that family of lan- 
guages) to render it probable that the Japanese is one of those varieties 



EXGLAXD .VXD JAPAX. 463 

The difficulty thus raised is not, however, insur- 
mountable. It may be met by the theory adopted by 
the eminent Orientalist Klaproth, accordino- to which 
Japan was early overrun by a Chinese conc[ueror, 
the founder of the present dynasty of Mikados, who 
adopted the language of the aboriginal race, while he 
imparted to them much of the form of civilisation and 
government which had already been developed in his 
own country. In accordance with this hypothesis we 
might suppose that the main stock of the popula- 
tion of Japan was a Turanian- speaking race (perhaps 
one of the Tungusean tribes from the north-east of 
China), whose language, long lost in their original 
seats under the strangely absorbent influence of the 
dominant race of that empire, still survives in the 
mellifluous vocalised tones which fall with so plea- 
sant a contrast on the European ear long fatigued 
with the harsh nasal twanc^ of Chinese. For there 
can be little doubt that over a considerable area 
of that enormous field where now we are hardly 
able to discern any thing but the homogeneity 
brought about by so many centuries of national 
unity, there was once a great variety of tribes broadly 
distinguished in. their speech and features from the 
Chiaese race proper. 

This theory of Klaproth would certainly appear to 
be ia harmony with such Japanese historical records 

of speech (referred to by M. Max MiUler in his Lectures on Language) 
•srhich had commenced to substitute inflexion for agglutination when 
arrested in their deTelopment. This might explain the greater power 
of combination which has led some to compare Japanese in this respect 
even with Greek or German. For the process, however really different, 
by which the two or more roots are welded into one word in an agglu- 
tinative language may easily be mistaken for the true inflexion-power 
of " word-building" possessed by the more highly developed forms of 
speech. 



464 ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 

as we are acquainted with. According to these au- 
thorities the present dynasty of Mikados is derived 
in an uninterrupted line of descent from Zinmu, who 
from his original kingdom in the south-west portion 
of the Japanese archipelago, apparently in the island 
of Kiu-siu, extended his empire over the southern 
half of the great island of Nippon. Now, though the 
narrative of his conquests is not unmixed with pro- 
digies, it appears not improbable that Zinmu was a 
real historical personage, and that the era assigned 
to him, the first half of the seventh century before 
our era, is approximately, correct. For the Japanese 
annals, which commence with Zinmu, though little 
more than a bare list of the succession of Mikados, 
with here and there a mention of an earthquake, a 
religious ceremony, or an extension of territory, are 
rendered more credible by this absence of the mar- 
vellous detail so easily supplied by the imagination 
of the myth-maker. And this sobriety is the more 
remarkable, because with Zinmu the national annals 
make an abrupt descent from a totally different world 
of decidedly fabulous character. And it corroborates 
Klaproth's hypothesis as to the origin of Zinmu, that, 
in the chronicles which Kasmpfer follows, between 
Zinmu and this earlier world has been interpolated 
a long list of Chinese emperors, extending through 
seventeen monarchs of the Chau dynasty, and all the 
preceding dynasties of Hia and Shang up to the my- 
thical Fohi, whose era is placed 2852 years before our 
own. It is true that in the historical tables translated 
from the Japanese by Siebold this foreign chrono- 
logy is altogether omitted, Zinmu being placed as the 
son and immediate successor of the last of a race of 
five demigods, the enormous periods of whose reigns 



ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 465 

lead up to a primeval dynasty of seven heavenly 
spirits. But these lists themselves bear a suspicious 
resemblance to the dynasties of the three august ones 
and the five sovereigns with which the Chinese com- 
mence their annals. And this resemblance is equally 
observable in the Japanese cosmogony, which, like 
that of China, is distinguished by the preponderance 
of the physical and realistic over the poetic and an- 
thropomorphic elements which are so strongly marked 
in the theological myths of India and Greece. Alto- 
gether the evidence furnished by comparative ethno- 
logy, as well as by national tradition, rather supports 
the theory of an early Chinese conquest or immigration 
in Japan, under a leader who founded the dynasty of 
Mikados, which has ever since held its court in the 
temple-palace, where they receive the honours due 
to their divine origin from "Zinmu, the god- warrior, 
the heaven-renowned prince." 

But whatever may be thought of the ethnological 
affinities of the Japanese, it is with the general nature 
of their present civilisation that we are practically 
concerned ; and in this we can more or less distinctly 
trace almost every phenomenon to its origin in the 
presence, more or less strongly marked, of the same 
elements which have determined the character of 
that of China. The general likeness between the 
superficial appearances of society in the two coun- 
tries is so close that the earliest European observers, 
who were well acquainted with China, pronounced 
the two civilisations identical. More careful study 
has detected many and great points of difference; 
but it is well to bear in mind this general resem- 
blance, in order that the real importance of the 
differences with which critics are chiefly concerned 

HH 



466 E^^GLAND AXD JAPAN. 

may not be exaggerated. The whole of Japanese 
art, literature, and philosophy, is confessedly bor- 
rowed from Chma, and the numerous petty pecu- 
liarities which distinguish the manners and social 
usages of the Chinese from those of the rest of the 
globe are generally shared with them by the Ja- 
panese. It has been observed by those well quahfied 
to judge that an almost indispensable preparation for 
the mastery of the colloquial language of Japan is a 
preliminary study of Chinese; and the same thing 
will, I believe, be found quite as true of Japanese 
history and civilisation. 

It is, however, when we come to form wider gene- 
ralisations as to the abstract ideas which lie at the 
root of the social organisations of the two empires and 
their concrete developments in the phenomena of his- 
tory, that the parallel becomes most interesting and 
instructive. To arrive at this point it is necessary to 
go back to the earliest period of which we have any 
authentic account ; for it is in the most remote past 
that the primitive elements which have been most in- 
fluential in the formation of the present are often most 
easily discernible. Fortunately for our purpose there 
is not much doubt that we possess in the sacred books 
of China, and especially in the canonical works ascribed 
to Confucius, a trustworthy picture of a very early 
stage in the history of the empire. The portraits 
of the early emperors in the Shoo-king may be only 
ideal myths; but we can at any rate collect from 
them the theory of government then recognised in 
China; while m the sage's account of the times 
nearer our own in the same book, and even in the 
meagre chronology of the Spring and Autumn Annals^ 
may plainly be discerned a less flattering picture of 



ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 467 

the state of things actually existing around him. 
Professedly founding the system of government and 
morals, which his authority has preserved almost un- 
impaired to the present day, upon the wisdom of his 
ancestors, Confucius supports it by representing it 
as only a restoration of the golden ages of antiquity. 
Thus it may be that the shadowy and heroic forms 
of the past are but the embodiment of the philoso- 
pher's aspirations for the future, though the evils 
which he would remedy are only too faithfully por- 
trayed from his own actual experience. What then 
is the theory of society which the mythical ideal 
illustrates? and what the actual condition which 
the contemporary history describes? Here, as else- 
where in the ancient world, two ideas imderlie the 
whole fabric of society — the theological and the 
patriarchal. The theology (here less properly so 
called) is that latest and most permanent modifi- 
cation of fetishism in which the material powers of 
the universe, of which heaven is the centre and the 
type, are worshipped as the immediate and arbitrary 
source of all good and evil, and therefore of all 
human authority or power, which, as directly derived 
from Heaven, claims the unhesitating reverence due 
to its divine origin. With the theological is closely 
associated the patriarchal. The paternal relation is 
at once the most obvious type and the most natural 
origin of all human power. Whatever, therefore, the 
process by which the absolute authority of the father 
of the family (the smallest recognised unit of social life) 
is transferred first to the head of the village or clan 
as an aggregate of families, and thence to the head of 
the nation, the father of a larger family — in every 
case the very possession of power gives the possessor 



468 ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 

something of that divine authority of which the es- 
sence lies in the arbitrariness of operation which it 
shares mth the powers of nature. The title of the 
supreme emperor being then both de jure and de facto 
(for here the two are identical), his y/ill is "the will 
of Heaven," by which his reign is confirmed. That 
this will of Heaven should be identified by some mth 
a theological, by others with a fatalistic, by some 
even with a popular basis of authority, is not to be 
wondered at. It is, in fact, a combination of all 
these claims, and it may be interpreted as pronoun- 
cing in favour of or against any individual emperor 
or dynasty by the signs either of national prosperity 
and adversity, or by the bestowal or withdrawal of 
those personal gifts of virtue, success, and ability, 
which are specially looked for in the " Son of Hea- 
ven." In this early, simple, and homogeneous con- 
dition of society no rival authority to the " Son of 
Heaven" exists in a polytheistic priesthood with its 
attendant system of caste and a distinct military 
class. Eites of worship and divination in propitia- 
tion of the gods of the land and of the grave, and 
other material powers of the universe, are performed 
without sacerdotal intervention by the father of the 
family, or by the emperor himself as the representa- 
tive of the nation. But the most important religious 
ceremonies are those honours which are paid at the 
tombs of the former heads of the family* for the 
sake of which posthumous worship of himself the 
father chiefly values the possession of male offspring. 
It almost seems as if, both with the deceased ances- 
tor and the emperor, the remoteness and mystery in 
which their personahty is shrouded, in the one case 
by death, and in the other by comparative isolation 



ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 469 

within the precincts of a sacred court, were sufficient 
in itself to confer on them, in the popular imagina- 
tion, the possession of that indefinite and arbitrary 
230wer which is the chief source of the awe and wor- 
ship mth which the material universe is regarded by 
the fetishist. Under such a rule every command of 
the ruler has the sanction of religion, and there is no 
place for the later distinction between the laws by 
which the state is governed and the customs sanc- 
tioned by the heaven-derived authority of ancestors 
as the rule of ordinary life; for here (even more than 
elsewhere in the East) institutions are every thing, 
and the individual is nothing ; and homogeneity, such 
as is difficult for us to conceive, characterises the 
whole social system. This is a rough sketch of the 
only theory of society known to the sacred books of 
China, and is that on which the whole governmental 
machinery there described turns as on a pivot. Ex- 
perience has shown that this is compatible not only 
with an elaborate and highly efficient administrative 
system, but with an advance in industrial and even 
intellectual condition, in which the entire absence of 
the more active principles of liberty and progress 
is, however inadequately, compensated by freedom 
from the evils of sacerdotal and military domination, 
through which our Western society has passed to 
its higher stage of development. 

Yet when we turn from this theoretical unity and 
symmetry to the actual condition of things which 
we know existed in China in the age of Confucius, 
we find much which is at variance with the ideal. 
Though nearly the whole of the eighteen provinces, 
which are now kno^vn as China Proper, already (and 
probably for many generations) had acknowledged 



470 ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 

the supreme autliority of the Chau dynasty, which 
then reigned in Shansi, yet the different clans or 
states of which their nominal empire was composed 
were very far from being incorporated together. In- 
deed the whole life of Confucius was spent in abor- 
tive attempts to compose the perpetual strife then 
waging between the neighbouring states. This dis- 
organised condition of the empire is indeed attri- 
buted to the unwise concessions made to the tribu- 
tary sovereigns by the first monarchs of the Chau 
dynasty; but it may be doubted whether the unity 
thus ascribed to the times of the dynasties of Hia and 
Shang is not merely mythical; though, on the other 
hand, it seems at least probable, from the nominal sub- 
mission paid by these tributary states to the emperor 
of Shansi, that they had really at some prior time 
been practically reduced under his sway, and were 
afterwards broken up into their original elements. 
This is a process of which the history of China for 
many centuries after Confucius affords constant ex- 
amples; a period of apparent unity and centralisa- 
tion being succeeded by one of separation and dism- 
tegration (sometimes into a great number of smaller 
kingdoms), which lasts until some great emperor again 
unites the whole under one sway. 

However this may have been, there can be no doubt 
about the general condition of the empire of China 
at the time of Confucius, and a century later at the 
epoch of Zinmu. The nominal supremacy of the dy- 
nasty of emperors in Shansi ap]}ears to have been ac- 
knowledged by the several distinct clans or kingdoms 
which overspread the area of what is now known as 
China Proper; but each of these states had a chief 
of its own, and was governed by its own laws or 



ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 471 

institutions. This is the condition which has suo^- 
gested to Europeans the analogy of Western feu- 
dalism, -which, if not pressed beyond the limits of 
accuracy, may be conveniently em]3loyed. This so- 
called feudal era is sometimes said to have been 
closed in Chma with the commencement of the 
dynasty of Tsin, under the celebrated Chi Hwang- 
Tf , who in the second half of the third century of 
our era laid the foundation of the permanent unity 
of the CQipire, and removed the two great obstacles 
to its security, by a reduction of the petty kingdoms 
into thirty-six provincial governments, administered 
by his own subordinates, and by the erection of the 
great line of fortifications against the invasions of the 
nomad hordes on the north-eastern frontier. 

But the consolidation thus effected by Chi Hwang- 
Ti' was only temporary, and indeed the attempt may 
almost be regarded as premature. Many times after 
his reio^n the miso;overnment or misfortune of the em- 
perors (interpreted as signs that their title de jure 
had, by the "mil of Heaven," passed away from 
them "with their power de facto) produced revolts 
which terminated in periods of disintegration, often 
of long duration. Yet the centralised government 
which he organised lasted long enough under his 
dynasty and that of Han (b.c. 249 to a.d. 221) to 
justify us in reckoning the subsequent disruptions 
as breaks in the chain of progress, and considering 
the normal government of the empire to be repre- 
sented by those long periods of unity under the great 
princes of Sin, Tang, and Sung. For it is this 
tendency towards the centralisation which has been 
effected under the Mongol, Ming, and Mantchou dy- 
nasties, which constitutes the main law of political 



472 ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 

development in Chinese history. It has often been 
checked and retarded by dynastic changes, provin- 
cial revolts, and foreign uivasions; but the process 
of unification has still proceeded. There is little 
doubt that the disorganised state of the interior 
which has been discovered in our own time is in 
a great measure traceable to the fatal influence of 
Western aggressions, which are so distinctly seen at 
work in the rebellions of the last few years. 

As to the means by which this centralisation has 
been effected in China, there is a general agreement 
among all competent judges. The political philo- 
sophy of Confucius has for many centuries been the 
text-book of Chinese statesmanship, and in its prin- 
ciples every officer of government has been trained 
and educated, until it forms not only the code of 
positive law, but the far more influential and wide- 
spread material of public opinion, which in the East so 
generally supersedes the action of the legislator. By 
its means the traditions of a remote past have been 
interwoven with the experience of the present. And 
their perpetuation has been guaranteed by the most 
powerful agency which can well be conceived. The 
system of public examinations has made the only ave- 
nue to power, influence, and authority to lie through 
a study of this philosophy. Its text has been com- 
mented on and illustrated through every successive 
generation by the greatest intellects of the nation, 
until round it has gathered a body of literature not 
inferior in volume and relative importance to that 
devoted to the sacred books of any other race or 
country. In this sense the philosophy of Confucius 
has been to China what theology was to the Middle 
Ages of Europe, the science of sciences. Whatever 



ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 473 

may be the inherent deficiencies of the system, 
to it must midoubtedly be referred whatever ex- 
cellence is to be found in Chinese civilisation 
and character. The time is past when it could be 
judged by the false standard of an absolute theory 
which can see no good and no evil but that which is 
deduced from its own preconceived notions. The 
relative method of modern historical investigation 
judges more fairly the phenomena of a civilisation 
so Avidely differing from our own in its origin and 
development. 

If we turn from this view of Chinese political so- 
ciety to the history and present condition of Japan, we 
find sufiicient resemblance to render the study of the 
one with which we are so much better acquainted an 
invaluable aid to the right understanding of the other, 
and sufficient difference to give an independent value 
to the investigation of the less-understood phenomena. 
In Chinese history we see the earliest stage of national 
organisation, that of the independent clan or state, 
itself an aggregate of village or family communities, 
transformed into a centralised government, in which 
all local authority is directly derived from and merged 
in the supreme rule of the emperor. In Japan, on 
the other hand, the political system is far more com- 
plex, because the original elements are more numer- 
ous and less reduced to homogeneity. In some im- 
portant respects the present condition of the island 
empire appears to resemble that which we must sup- 
pose to have existed in the so-called feudal era of 
Chinese history. The territorial sway of the great 
chiefs (or Daimios), all owing allegiance to the Mi- 
kado and his lieutenant the Tycoon, has in Japan 
always more or less successfully resisted the central- 



474 ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 

ising efforts of the more energetic of their suzerains. 
Indeed, their authority has no doubt been much 
consolidated and increased in the course of time by 
the force of hereditary and agrarian influence. The 
scanty materials afforded by the few extracts hitherto 
made from the national . records of Japan make any 
attempt at a detailed analysis of its history at pre- 
sent hopeless. But the researches of Kcempfer, Tit- 
singh, and Siebold afford sufficient evidence that in 
the earlier ages of the country the two features which 
now so broadly distinguish its social organisation 
from that of ancient China were far less conspicuous. 
These peculiarities of modern Japan are, first, the 
almost complete separation which exists between the 
executive power lodged in the hands of the Tycoon, 
and the theoretical supremacy still residing in the 
person of the Mikado ; and secondly, the comparative 
independence of the territorial chiefs, who, while they 
yield a nominal allegiance to the Mikado, and less 
readily to the Tycoon as his representative, not only 
reserve to themselves the general right of exercising 
an almost irresponsible government within their own 
dominions and over their own people and clan, but 
are often sufficiently powerful, either alone or in 
combination, to exert an overwhelming influence on 
the action of the supreme government in matters 
which concern the policy of the whole empire. 

There is, as I have said, every reason to believe 
that both these features of Japanese society are in 
their present form of comparatively recent origin. 
The early Mikados, far from being the inert and life- 
less puppets who now so meanly support the burden 
of a dignity which forbids them all active participa- 
tion in the affairs of men, themselves led armies in 



ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 475 

person, and formed the virtual as well as the nominal 
centre of the state-system. And while this continued, 
the Daimios, as chiefs of the different clans, though 
no doubt in a state of almost chronic discord and re- 
volt, yet were not only theoretically subject to the 
authority of the Mikados, but, under the sway of the 
more powerful of them, were frequently reduced, it 
might be only for a time, to a real subjection ; and 
this temporary subjection might, under equally favour- 
able circumstances, have been gradually transformed, 
as in China, into a real unity round the central au- 
thority. 

But the course of events has produced a very dif- 
ferent result. The great difficulty which Europeans 
find in understanding the true relations to each other 
of the different elements among which the governing 
power of Japan is distributed arises, no doubt, mainly 
from their ignorance of the past history of the coun- 
try. For here, as in so many other nations, the 
original institutions have been practically modified 
by circumstances, mthout thereby losing altogether 
either their external form or their theoretical sym- 
metry. It is probably almost as difficult for an Eng- 
lishman to comprehend the working of the existing 
Japanese Government as it would be for a Japanese 
to comprehend the English Constitution; and for 
precisely the same reason. Both would be compara- 
tively ignorant of the long series of causes by which 
the present complicated results have been produced, 
and therefore quite unable to discriminate how much 
each element in the state is practically controlled by 
the others ; how far the theoretical supremacy attri- 
buted to the monarch is a mere fiction of the past or 
a living reality; m what respects the action of the 



476 ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 

executive is controlled by the deliberative element. 
Much light may, however, be thrown on these points 
by even the little which is known of the political his- 
tory of Japan. This divides itself naturally into three 
periods. In the first, which extends from Zinmu 
(b.c. 600) to the first century of our era, the social 
organisation of Japan probably closely resembled that 
of China in what is known as the feudal era. The 
Mikado's authority — like that of the Chinese em- 
peror, and resting mainly on the same theoretical 
basis — was during this period gradually extending 
itself over the whole of the empire ; and the original 
clan system of the difierent states was ajoparently by 
degrees giving place to a more centralised form of 
government. The primitive and indigenous fetishism 
which then prevailed may still be traced, though in a 
mixed and modified form, in the Sintooism, or way 
of the Kami, which is said still to be the prevailing 
form of religion with the higher classes. It is, how- 
ever, clear that the earlier stage of fetishism, in which 
worship is paid to each separate external object of 
nature as an independent power, has never in Japan 
been but imperfectly superseded by that more abstract 
and generalised form of the worship of the great ele- 
mentary powers, and of Heaven as their representative 
and centre, which has been reached by the Chinese. 
Yet there has been in Japan considerable modifica- 
tion by fusion with the foreign element of theology, 
whose introduction marks the next epoch of Japanese 
history. 

This second period extends from the second to 
the twelfth centuries of the Christian era. Its cha- 
racter appears to have been determined chiefly by 
the progress of the Baddhist faith, introduced at its 



ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 477 

commencement. This form of theology — among 
other characteristics in which it resembles the Ca- 
tholic system of Christianity — possesses to an emi- 
nent degree the quality of adaptability. It is, and 
always has been, very different in different countries 
and at different times. In Cashmere, in Thibet, in 
Siam, in Burmah, and in Ceylon, in China and in 
Japan, Buddhism has developed itself in the most 
distinct forms; whereas in Hindostan and China it 
had found another form of religion and society too 
firmly rooted to be altogether supplanted; it has 
settled do^vn by its side, and modified its own cha- 
racteristics so as at once to assimilate and be assimi- 
lated to the dominant creed. Thus, on its first in- 
troduction into Japan, though it found the original 
fetishism too weak to resist its intellectual superiority, 
yet this was sufiiciently firmly rooted in the popular 
mmd to exercise a great reactionary influence on 
Buddhism itself. Thus, at the present day, it has 
often been observed that the difference between the 
Sintoo and the Buddhist forms of worship and creed 
is to superficial observers almost indistinguishable. 
Still its independent power grew so rapidly and 
surely that before the end of the second period there 
can be little doubt that Buddhism was able to count 
as many, if not more, votaries than the Sintoo faith, 
and that over this it had exercised so prej^onderating 
an influence that it offered no impediment to the 
supremacy of the Buddhist priesthood. 

In the political development of this second period 
may also be traced decided marks of the influence of 
Buddhist ideas. For the divine origin attributed by 
the Sintoo fetishism to the Mikado's authority the 
Buddhist found a corresponding and still more sacred 



478 ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 

expression in liis characteristic dogma of the incarna- 
tion of the deity in the person of the sovereign. But 
on the other hand the very sanctity thus attached to 
the person of the Mikado gradually tended to produce 
that separation between his spiritual and temporal 
authority which is the distinctive feature of Ja- 
panese government. The practical and realistic cha- 
racter of the Japanese intellect rendered it impos- 
sible for the people to sink, as in Burmah and Siam, 
under the absolute domination of the priesthood. 
Nor was the great vitality still inherent in the or- 
ganisations of the different states or clans at all 
favourable to such a universal sway of the priestly 
element. Had the power of the Mikado remained, 
as in China, in his own hands, perhaps these feudal 
chiefs might have gradually been subjected to his 
central authority. But the enervating influence of 
Buddhist asceticism appears before very long to have 
been discernible in the feebleness of the Mikados and 
their government. A period of disorder lasting for 
some generations, in the course of which the admi- 
nistration of affairs was constantly discharged by the 
captains-general of the kingdom, as lieutenants and 
representatives of the Mikado, marks the close of 
this second era in Japanese history. In the course 
of it the practical authority of the Mikado, always 
with difficulty maintained over the more powerful 
Daimios, had been gradually growing weaker, and 
the bonds which united the different parts of the 
nation much loosened. The results were similar to 
those which ensued during the feudal periods of 
Chinese history. While the clan- chieftains acquired 
a great accession of power and independence, the 
dynasty of the Mikados — as their spiritual dignity 



ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 479 

gradually encroached on their political functions 
— became a prey to family dissensions. Had this 
state of things continued, the result must have been 
that the empire would have been broken up into a 
number of independent states under the headship of 
the several territorial powers, who would perhaps 
have scarcely owned a nominal allegiance to the Mi- 
kado as a spiritual superior. 

But this consequence was averted by the rise of 
another power in the state, which, confessedly deriving 
its origin and authority from the Mikado, gradually 
assumed the functions which he had abdicated. This 
was the personage known to Europeans by his as- 
sumed title of Tycoon, or emperor. He was origin- 
ally only the officer to whom the administration of 
the army was intrusted, but, from the possession 
of this material basis of power, before long he ex- 
tended his authority over the whole field of the 
executive, which had been surrendered by his now 
spiritualised and enfeebled sovereign. This was the 
expedient by which the national character of the 
Japanese has been preserved, on the one hand, from 
the degrading influence of a purely theological des- 
potism, like that of Thibet; and on the other, from 
the chronic disorganisation and intestine warfare 
which prevailed throughout the so-called feudal era 
both here and in China. It is the introduction 
of this new element that marks that latest stage of 
Japanese political organisation, of the development of 
which we are witnesses at the present day. This third 
period commences with Yoritomo (in the twelfth 
century of our era), the first Tycoon whose func- 
tions were hereditary in one family or its different 
branches. His dynasty, exercising an authority at 



480 ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 

first subordinate to the Mikado, by degrees attained 
an independent position, and absorbed most of the 
active functions of supreme government, which the 
power of the Daimios still allowed to the descend- 
ants of Zinmu. But the Tycoons, the successors of 
Yoritomo, having originally acquired their position 
by superior force, and being supported by no tra- 
ditional or religious authority, were always subject 
to the danger of attack from the more powerful 
Daimios, or from a confederation among them. Such 
a danger in a period of more than ordinary poli- 
tical convulsion proved fatal to Yoritomo's dynasty 
in 1558. 

The authority thus lost was, however, grasped by 
firmer hands. The celebrated Taiko-Sama, originally a 
follower and general of the last Tycoon of that race, 
defeated the attempts of the Daimios to overthrow his 
master by force ; but after breaking the power of these 
great vassals he assumed to himself the reins of go- 
vernment which he had snatched from their grasp, 
and by the force of his genius established his own 
authority on a far firmer basis than that on which the 
dynasty of Yoritomo had ever rested. He succeeded 
not only in rendering himself practically independent 
of the Mikado, but even for a time in the far more 
arduous task of reducing into submission all the 
great Daimios. Claimmg for itself a rank subordinate 
to the Mikado, the dignity of Tycoon — hereditary in 
three great families, the descendants of Taiko-Sama — 
from being that of a mere lieutenant of the Mikado, 
thus grew into that of an emperor independent of all 
superior authority, with a distinct court and capital 
of his own at Jeddo ; while the Mikado, whose sacred 
dairi or court was held at Miako, became little more 



ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 481 

tlian an abstraction, a mere impersonation of the spiri- 
tual supremacy, of which he enjoyed nothing except 
the empty pageant of divme worship, by which his 
every action was fettered and encumbered. Round 
this court of Miako, at which the Tycoon still paid his 
stated visits of homage, the now humbled Daimios 
continued to gather, and enjoyed the empty title of 
the Great Council and Ministers of the Empire of 
Japan, at the time when the whole executive functions 
of its general government were really discharged 
by the Tycoon and his subordinate ministers at 
Jeddo. Still, within their own territories the autho- 
rity of the Daimios over their own retainers and 
the whole subject-class of agriculturists was prac- 
tically unrestrained. For the great political problem 
which Taiko-Sama and his successors had to solve 
was the same which had proved so insurmountable to 
the Mikados in the days of their fullest power. It 
was, how to reconcile the internal peace and unity of 
the empire with the virtual independence of the terri- 
torial chiefs. This they have not been able to accom- 
plish more than very partially. The military genius 
and great personal qualities of Taiko-Sama enabled 
him to put the power of the Daimios for a time at 
defiance, and to maintain the supremacy of his cen- 
tral government. But in the hands of his successors 
the influence of the Tycoon has suffered considerable 
diminution. The Great Council at Miako, composed 
of all the most powerful Daimios, and deriving its 
legitimacy from the sacred name of the Mikado, who 
is its nominal head, has under the later Tycoons re- 
covered something more than its theoretical su2Dre- 
macy. Among its members the Tycoon has always 
been able to count a considerable party of supporters, 

II 



482 ENGLAND AND JAPAK. 

and in ordinary times and under the more able Ty- 
coons tlie amount of its interference with the general 
administration of the empire by the court at Jeddo 
appears to be but small. As long as their interests 
and territorial independence are not menaced, or 
there is no great question which intimately affects the 
whole empire, the Tycoon appears to be left to ad- 
minister the government by means of his own minis- 
ters, and through the agency of an elaborate civil 
and military organisation, the machinery of which is 
under the direction of himself and his ministers at 
Jeddo. But if, as sometimes happens, the measures 
of the Tycoon are generally unacceptable to the 
whole body of the Daimios, he is often compelled to 
alter or abandon his policy, and sometimes even to 
sacrifice his ministers at their dictation. 

From what has been said it will be seen that the 
distribution of political power among the governing 
powers of Japan is hardly more exactly determined 
than it is in many other countries nearer ourselves, 
and that the separate influence of each element over 
the whole body is by no means an invariable quan- 
tity. The original theocratic supremacy attributed 
to the Mikado as heaven-born descendant of Zinmu 
has been theoretically intensified but practically neu- 
tralised by the mysterious seclusion in which he 
has been involved by the Buddhist dogmas. His 
name is still reverenced as the only universal symbol 
of authority, and its sacred title constantly employed 
by different parties in the state in order to support 
their own claims to supremacy. Yet it appears pro- 
bable that, though it was only as lieutenant and 
vicegerent of the Mikado that the Tycoon originally 
claimed sway over the whole empire, nevertheless, 



ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 483 

if the successors of Taiko-Sama had. inlierited his 
energy and talents, the absolute power theoretically 
vested in the one might have been practically exer- 
cised by the other. But they have been so powerless 
to break the independent power of the great territorial 
chiefs, who were from the first the great obstacles to 
the centralisation of the government, that the Daimios 
have succeeded not only in preserving their autocracy 
within their own territories, but in keeping up by 
means of the authority of the Mikado a really practical 
control over the action of the Jeddo government. 

This very general sketch of the relations between 
the different elements among which the governing 
power is distributed in Japan will, I hope, be suffi- 
ciently accurate to explain most of the difficulties 
which have arisen from the apparent contradictions, 
discovered in the facts as reported by earlier and 
more recent observers. That this subject has a di- 
rectly practical bearing on the relations of Japan 
with the Western Powers, is well known to all who 
have given any attention to the question. For it 
followed from the somewhat uncertain basis of the- 
authority of the Tycoon, with whom alone our diplo- 
matic engagements have been made, that his authority 
to conclude a negotiation so important in its bearing 
on the general policy of the whole empire was from 
the first very open to question, and his acts liable to 
be repudiated by the council of the Mikado and the 
hostility of the great Daimios. And this is what has 
actually occurred. The American minister (whom 
we and the other Western Powers have followed) 
concluded his treaty with the Tycoon, because Euro- 
peans had been led by the past experience of their 
relations mth Japan to regard that functionary as 



484 ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 

the temporal sovereign of the empire. For the 
Portuguese and their contemporaries, who had to 
deal with Taiko-Sama and his immediate successors, 
rightly regarded them as possessors of the supreme 
political authority ; and it was from them, too, that 
the Dutch colony at Decima obtained and inherited 
their scanty and hard-earned privileges. But the 
Tycoons of the present day no longer occupy the 
same position. They have become more amalga- 
mated with the rest of the great chiefs of the coun- 
try. The individual succession to their office appears 
to be determined by the selection of the council of 
Daimios out of the representatives of three families 
■descended from the same stock ; and they are very 
liable, therefore, to degenerate into mere nomipiees 
of the dominant party in that council which repre- 
sents the legitimate supremacy of the Mikado. This 
important fact was before long discovered by the 
foreign ministers at Jeddo, who thus found their 
negotiations with the Tycoon and his ministers, even 
on points as to which these latter were sincerely 
-anxious to maintain friendly intercourse, eventually 
liable to be frustrated by the interference of a supe- 
rior national authority. This difficulty, which it has 
l)een up to this time impossible for the foreign minis- 
ters to remove by obtaining the ratification of the 
treaty by the Mikado, is one which sprung directly 
out of our ignorance of the true nature of the consti- 
tution and history of the country. 

But it is not only on this somewhat intricate con- 
stitutional question that our diplomatists have had to 
learn much from their failures. They have in fact 
made throughout the great mistake of underrating 
the force of the obstacles which opposed their success 



ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 485 

and overratmg their OAvn means of overcoming them. 
The origin of this behaviour is to be found in their 
not approaching the questions at issue from a relative 
point of view, but applying to them the false standard 
of Western political knowledge and experience. In 
attempting to force foreign intercourse on Japan, 
they have constantly been opposed by a vis inertice, 
on which it has baffled all their efforts to make 
any impression. For there is in Japan, as in other 
Oriental countries, an authority which is far more 
powerful than that of any visible potentate, even 
that of the heaven-born Mikado himself. This power 
is that of traditional usage. " Law and established 
custom," it has been said, " unvarying, known to all 
and pressing on all alike, are the despots of Japan. 
Scarcely an action of life is exempt from their rigid, 
inflexible, and irksome control ; but he who complies 
with their dictates has no arbitrary power, no capri- 
cious tyranny, to apprehend." And this is no doubt 
generally true, especially on those more important 
matters on which innovation would be a shock to 
long-settled prepossessions. 

Against such an obstacle it is that we have had to 
contend in the Japanese system of isolation of them- 
selves from other nations, by the rigid exclusion of all 
foreigners from intercourse with the country. This po- 
licy had been steadily pursued for more than 200 years, 
and had therefore become an integral part of the na- 
tional character, when it was broken in upon by the 
treaties concluded in our own time with the Western 
Powers. It will presently be seen how this great change 
was effected by our diplomatists. Here it will only be 
necessary to say a few words on the causes which led 
to the adoption of this prohibitive system. 



486 e:ngland and japan. 

The general history of Western intercourse with 
Japan in the sixteenth century has often been told : 
of the friendly reception given to the first Portuguese 
mariners and missionaries; of the devoted and ap- 
parently successful labours of the Jesuits, and the 
number and rank of their native proselytes ; of the 
opposition by the Buddhist and other national priest- 
hoods, and the jealousy ere long aroused by this 
highly- organised band of foreigners in the govern- 
ment, whose authority rested so much on the reli- 
gious basis which they w^ere striving to undermine; 
of the bitter quarrels between the original Portu- 
guese Jesuits and their Spanish Dominican suc- 
cessors; of the impolitic interference, whereby the 
Pope was invoked by the Spaniards to repudiate the 
judicious compromise with the national faith entered 
into by the msdom of the Jesuits ; of the fanaticism 
which openly persecuted the national priesthood, 
overthrew the national temples, and insulted the 
national faith m its most sacred associations with 
the worship at the tombs of ancestors ; of the open 
partisanship assumed by the Christians in the politi- 
cal intrigues and internal dissensions of the empire ; 
of the consequences of all these things, in the sen- 
tence of perpetual exclusion against all missionaries 
and death against all their native adherents, pro- 
claimed but never carried out by Taiko-Sama; of 
the final catastrophe of the extermination of Chris- 
tianity from the empire, by the universal massacre 
of all its followers, the devoted missionaries toge- 
ther with their heroic converts; and lastly, of the 
total disappearance of that faith, its professors and 
its influence, leaving behind no marks whatever 
of its presence for nearly a century on the coun- 



ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 487 

try, where its complete triumph had been so closely 
approached — any more than if the thing had never 
been. Of all this the outlines at least are familiar 
to all. They need be recalled to memory here, 
only to contrast it with the fact that during the 
intervening period between that time and our own 
the condition of Japan had, by the unanimous testi- 
mony of all observers, been one of internal peace and 
prosperity, which no party in the state has ever 
had the faintest inclination to disturb by the re- 
introduction of the elements which had produced 
only discord and revolution. On this policy of isola- 
tion, indeed, they have no doubt often, and with good 
reason, congratulated themselves. Through the bar- 
riers which they had set up there had doubtless crept 
rumours of the inroads which the West was continu- 
ally making in the East. They may have trembled 
as they heard how the influence of the merchants 
of the factories of Madras and Calcutta had swollen 
into that of the lords of Hindostan. The nearer fate 
of China, at any rate, could not be unknown to them. 
There they saw the professed pursuit of commerce con- 
verted into a pretext first for military occupation, and 
then for an aggressive policy, which was already disor- 
ganising the whole social fabric of that vast empire. 

The strength of the conservatism thus originated 
and fostered has gradually been discovered by our 
diplomatists. The bolder of them hope that it will 
eventually be overcome; but the means on which 
they rely appear to be very little calculated in the 
end to effect their object. It is by playing off the 
various political parties of the country, the Mil^ado, 
the Daimios, and the Tycoon, one against the other, 
that they hope to produce such a turn in political 



488 ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 

affairs as will facilitate the farther introduction of 
the foreign element into the country. The Western 
Powers will then be able to enforce, by the superi- 
ority of their warlike resources, their demands on 
the national party, whose resistance will be enfeebled 
by the dissension which, it is hoped, may be thus kin- 
dled into open conflagration. But the results which 
will almost certainly follow this policy are likely to be 
very much more serious than are anticipated, and 
are not unforeseen by the Japanese rulers themselves. 
Japanese society, if not as homogeneous as that of 
China, still depends, as we have seen, for the preser- 
vation of its whole fabric upon the maintenance of 
the national traditions, which form so im]3ortant a 
part of its political and religious system. It is by 
these traditions that not only the relations between 
the ruling powers in the state are regulated, but 
the absolute subservience of the rest of the nation, 
of the whole body of the agricultural and mercantile 
classes, is alone secured. Whatever may have been 
the different and conflicting accounts as to the dis- 
tribution of power among the rulers, there is but one 
opinion as to the present political status of the other 
portion of the population of Japan. If the 300 or 
400 great Daimios, with all their military retainers, 
together with the numerous soldier functionaries of 
the government, be thrown into one class, it is pro- 
bable that even numerically their proportion to the 
rest of the nation would exceed that of any other 
Eastern country. But in political importance the 
influence of inferior classes is at present, and in 
ordinary times, quite imperceptible. They are held 
down by combined powers which might well seem 
omnipotent and irresistible. Traditional reverence, 



ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 489 

military force, legislation, if unwritten, yet of a 
minuteness and penal severity unparalleled in any 
other country, and the close network of a system of 
espionage which is almost omnipresent : these are the 
forces which keep in subjection a population whose 
intelligence, industry, and self-respect has been the 
theme of eulogy so general and so well merited. 
But these checks depend most of all for their force 
on the fact that resistance to its rulers has, for cen- 
turies at any rate, been unknown in the country. 
Let its social bonds be once loosened by the revolu- 
tionary disorganisation- which will ensue from poli- 
tical dissensions, and then the spectacle of their 
hereditary superiors brought into familiar and equal 
intercourse with foreigners whom they have been 
taught to hate, and merchants whom they have learnt 
to regard as, like themselves, belonging to an utterly 
inferior class of society, cannot fail before long to 
produce its effects. The whole governing force of the 
country must soon become so weak, that there will 
be little reason for surprise if we see it delivered over, 
and more disastrously than China itself, to the de- 
vastating terror of armed bands of men suddenly 
forced from the controlling sway of traditional au- 
thority, and vainly seeking for something to replace 
the social organisation which has been prematurely 
dissolved. For it is folly of the most extreme nature 
to expect that for the system thus overthrown any 
substitute will be found by the Japanese themselves. 
The whole history of the relations between the East 
and West shows that the more highly-developed civi- 
lisation brought into direct contact with the lower 
acts in itself as a general solvent, and that for the 
disorder thus produced there is no remedy but in the 



490 ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 

assumption in some way or other of tlie government 
by the higher race. Yet this responsibility is hardly 
one which England is ready to assume. Meantime 
the leaven which has been introduced in Japan must 
continue to work, and ere long the chaotic disturb- 
ance which must follow will materially affect the 
profits which the commercial genius and enterprise 
of our merchants have contrived to monopolise. Thus 
the very policy which has in a great measure been 
forced on our unwilling statesmen by the pressure of 
the mercantile class will, by a well-earned retribution, 
react most injuriously on the interests of those who 
are responsible for its initiation. 

II. 

The preceding pages have been mainly occupied 
with an investigation into the abstract character of 
Japanese political society. Those which follow will 
treat more in detail of the principal events which have 
marked the intercourse of Great Britain with the 
country, and will indicate a general policy by which 
it appears likely that the misfortunes and failures 
which have hitherto attended our negotiations may 
be for the future avoided. No doubt there is much 
in what has hitherto been said which is either incom- 
plete or inaccurate, and the generalisations may be 
premature or even mistaken. But the difficulties of 
the subject have hitherto arisen in a great degree 
from the insufficiency of materials for forming satis- 
factory conclusions, and the consequent impossibility 
of reconciling contradictory facts and opinions. In 
what follows there will be no such risk of error. For 
the succeeding commentary on the relations of Eng- 
land with Japan the authority is quite indisputable. 



ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 491 

It will in almost all cases be drawn from the diploma- 
tic papers published in the Parliamentary Blue-book 
on Japan. This selection is made, by the authority 
of the government which directed the policy, from 
the reports of their agents who conducted its detailed 
operation. It is not likely therefore to furnish evi- 
dence unduly adverse to the character of the trans- 
actions or of those responsible for them. 

The contents of these Blue-books relate to two 
principal topics ; the negotiations of the representatives 
of the two governments respecting the commercial 
treaty, and the difficulties which have arisen from the 
acts of individuals among the Japanese on the one side, 
and the British residents on the other. Unfortunately 
the space and attention which the latter topic occupies 
throughout the correspondence is out of all proportion 
to its intrinsic importance. And this fact has pro- 
bably had the effect of misleading public opinion in 
this country whenever special attention has been di- 
rected to Japanese affairs. Our politicians have re- 
garded the series of collisions between the subjects of 
the two countries too much apart from the general re- 
lations between their governments, and have attempted 
to apply to them the rules of international intercourse 
which have been established by Western custom. It 
will therefore be desirable to show, from the admis- 
sions of our ministers in Japan, what was the origin 
and nature of the commercial treaty on which alone 
British residents can base any claim to the protection 
of the Japanese government, either for their trade, 
their property, or their persons. If the accusation of 
one-sidedness be, not without some show of justice, 
made against the selection of extracts which follow, 
my defence must be, that it is only by stating the 



492 ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 

facts from the Japanese point of view that we can 
arrive at any fair conclusions as to their part in the 
matter. It will be my endeavour, before I conclude, 
fairly to examine the arguments which can be alleged 
in defence of the conduct of Great Britain and her 
representatives. The pleas in justification of our 
course must rest on those principles of morality and 
justice which have been long established among 
Western nations. There can, I think, be no unfair- 
ness in judging each nation by the standard of right 
and expediency which it professedly recognises, or 
in allowing each to consult what it considers to be 
its true interests in the points at issue. 

It was on the 26th August 1858 that Lord Elgin, 
as Plenipotentiary of the Queen of England, and 
five commissioners on behalf of the Tycoon of Japan, 
signed a treaty of peace, friendship, and commerce 
between the two countries, by which the Tycoon 
agreed to the following concessions in favour of the 
other contracting party. By art. 2, that a British 
diplomatic agent be allowed to reside at Jeddo, and 
consuls at all the ports opened by the treaty, and that 
the diplomatic agent travel freely in any part of the 
empire. By art. 3, that the three ports of Hakodadi, 
Kanagawa, and JSFagasaki be opened to British sub- 
jects from 1st July 1859, and two others, Neegata (or 
some other port on the Western coast of Nippon) and 
Hiogo, on 1st January 1863; that British subjects 
be allowed to own land and buildings, and perma- 
nently reside in all the above places when opened, 
and also to reside and have houses for purposes of 
trade within certain limits in the two inland cities of 
Jeddo and Osaca. By art. 4, that all questions be- 
tween British subjects in Japan be subject to the 



ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 493 

British authorities. By art. 5, that British subjects 
committing crimes against Japanese laws be punished 
by British authorities according to British laws. By 
art. .8, that the Japanese government place no re- 
strictions whatever on the employment by British 
subjects of Japanese in any lawful capacity. By art. 
9, that British subjects in Japan be allowed the free 
exercise of their religion, and to erect places of wor- 
ship. By art. 10, that all foreign coin be current in 
Japan, and pass for its corresponding weight in Japan- 
ese coin of the same description ; and that the Japan- 
ese government will, for one year after opening of 
each port, furnish in exchange for British or foreign 
coin an equal weight of Japanese coin, without dis- 
count for recoinage. By art. 12, that assistance and 
friendly treatment, and means of conveyance to the 
nearest consulate, be immediately rendered by the 
Japanese authorities to all British vessels wrecked or 
compelled to take refuge any where on the coast of 
Japan. By art. 14, that British subjects be allowed to 
import and export every description of merchandise 
on payment of treaty-dues ; and further, that all classes 
of Japanese be allowed freely and without the inter- 
vention of their own officers to buy and sell all articles 
offered to British subjects, with the exception of mu- 
nitions of war. By art. 16, that all goods imported 
into Japan by British subjects after payment of treaty- 
dues be allowed to be transported by the Japanese 
into any part of the empire without any further duty 
whatever. By art. 23, that Great Britain be allowed 
the benefit of any privileges which may have been or 
might be granted by the Tycoon to any other nation. 
These were the advantages which Great Britain, 
as one party to the treaty, secured for itself Of any 



494 ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 

corresponding benefit to be derived by Japan there 
is not one word throughout. This one-sidedness in 
the case of a convention between two Western Powers 
would no doubt be impossible. But it will be said 
that in this case it was quite unnecessary that 
the corresponding concessions on the part of Great 
Britain should be provided for by the terms of the 
treaty ; as there is nothing here required of the Ja- 
panese government that was not fully reciprocated 
on our part to any Japanese who might contract 
relations with us either in his own or in our coun- 
try; and that the special clauses, such as the eighth, 
tenth, fourteenth, and sixteenth, which directly con- 
trol the action of the Japanese authorities in their re- 
lations with their own subjects, are nothing but the 
guarantees indispensable to secure any practical efi*ect 
to the rest. The inestimable advantages of trade and 
intercourse with the whole civilised West are perfectly 
open to the Japanese, and are supposed to give them 
far more than an equivalent to any slight profit which 
the Western Powers can derive from the very partial 
opening thus allowed to their commercial enterprise. 
Regarding the position, as it was regarded by the 
British ministers, from our point of view, this may 
not at first sight appear untrue. But in order to 
understand the true relations between the contract- 
ing parties it is necessary to know in what estima- 
tion the government of Japan itself regarded these 
great blessings. It will hardly be disputed that the 
value which one party to a contract sets on the con- 
sideration which he is to receive is a material element 
in the question of its adequacy. And it would appear 
equally clear that violence no less than fraud vitiates 
the engagement which has been made under its in- 



ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 495 

fluence. Xotv, on this point it might be sufficient 
to point to the clauses which bind the Japanese 
government not to render the treaty nugatory, as 
showing that our diplomatists were not unaware that 
they had to deal with those who were acting under 
some sort of force majeure. But the real state of 
the case can hardly be more plainly expressed than 
in the words of Sir R. (then Mr.) Alcock, in a de- 
spatch dated 23d Nov. 1859: ''That the Japanese 
government look upon all foreign treaties, trade, and 
relations, as so many unmitigated evils, I have al- 
ready informed your lordship there is everj^ reason to 
believe."* And this opinion of the British minister 
was founded most conclusively upon the fact that 
every possible opposition had been persistently made 
by the Japanese authorities not only to the slightest 
extension of foreign intercourse, but even to the many 
measures indispensable to the execution of the letter 
of the treaty itself. Indeed the whole correspond- 
ence between our foreio^n ministers and their a^rents 
in Japan teems with a constant outburst of com- 
plaints of the practical proof which every hour has 
afforded of the value which the Japanese rulers set 
upon the benefits of free intercourse with the West- 
ern world. Extracts in proof of this might be mul- 
tiplied until nearly the whole of the Japanese Blue- 
books had been transcribed. 

This beino; so, it mio^ht well create astonishment 
how we contrived to persuade the Tycoon to agree to 
an engagement in which, in his judgment at any rate, 
the whole gain was so exclusively on one side. On 
this point also nothing can be more candid and ex- 
plicit than the testimony of the British minister. 
* Blue-book on Japan (1860), p. 27. 



496 ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 

"The gathering together of large forces by Great Britain for 
the prosecution of their demands on China, in alliance with 
France; the generally-rumoured intention of the two governments, 
and also of Eussia, to send plenipotentiaries shortly to Japan 
to open more effectually the ports of that country to European 
commerce and enterprise; all, no doubt, tended materially to 
giye weight to the more pacific arguments of the American agent, 
urging that the true policy of Japan was no longer to defer 
doing, under the most favourable and honourable conditions, 
without compromising its dignity or independence, that which 
must come under wholly different circumstances before the year 
was out. And thus the foundation for a commercial treaty ivas 
laid, hj jpointing out to the Ja'panese Government that the time ivas 
plainly approacliing luhen refusal on their part tvould de impos- 
sible, for they would have the Western world in collective strength 
breaking down the barriers."* 

And equally plain is his language respecting the cir- 
cumstances by which the Japanese authorities were 
led to acquiesce in the demands for similar terms, 
which Lord Elgin, on the part of Great Britain, im- 
mediately after the forcible imposition of the treaty 
of Tien-tsin on China, urged with all the weight of 
armed success. 

" Their present relations with foreign states have been imposed 
upon the Japanese rulers by circumstances which a party no 
longer in ofi&ce had the good judgment probably to perceive were 
becoming irresistible and menacing ; while the great body of the 
Daimios or feudal princes, whose nominees are now in power as 
ministers, continue blind and hostile. The signing of the treaty 
concluded by Mr. Harris was the signal for great political com- 
motion, and the disgrace of all concerned in the negotiation, even 
down to the subordinates. The lives of the chief ministers were 
for some time in danger, so violent was the feeling among the 
majority of those who are the real depositaries of power at the 
present moment in Japan, the great hereditary prince of the 
empire, whose nominee the Tycoon himself is in effect. The 

«^- Cap. of Tycoon, i. p. 110. 



ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 497 

prompt dismissal of the ministers who were in office when the 
treaty with America was executed, and the nomination of those 
who have since continued in power, was a retrograde act, intended 
by the Daimios to put a stop to any farther concession. Circum- 
stances were, hoivever, too strong for them, and these same ministers, 
representing all the hostile and antagonistic tendencies of their party, 
found themselves under the cruel necessity of signing in rcfpid suc- 
cession treaties -with most of the great Poivers in Europe, each more 
liberal than its predecessor ."* 

The fact, then, is indisputable that the treaty with 
the Tycoon of Japan, on which alone Great Britain 
can rely as giving her any claim whatever to main- 
tain her present position in that country, was ori- 
ginally imposed upon an unwilling contractor under 
the immediate and compulsory influences of superior 
force and intimidation. And it is equally certain 
that nothing but the constant menace of war and 
invasion, supported by the warning examples of 
China and India, has ever since prevented the 
Japanese authorities from openly repudiating the 
whole transaction into which they were so unwill- 
ingly dra-wn, expelling all foreigners once more 
from their shores, and retiring to that state of isola- 
tion under which they believe their country to have 
enjoyed so much peace and prosperity. Their past 
history tells them of the evils which their friendly 
reception of foreigners brought on the land; and 
have the present generation of Japanese had any 
reason to congratulate themselves on their own 
change of policy? This question may again be an- 
swered by the same witness. 

Speaking of the continued hostility to foreigners, 
which was every day showing itself at Jeddo and 

"■ Letter from Mr. Alcock to Lord Malmesbury, July 1859 ; Blue- 
book on Japan, 18G0, p. 370. 

KK 



498 ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 

Yokohama, at one time by a vexatious opposition to 
the carrying out of the treaty, and at another by acts 
of violence and insults towards the persons and pro- 
perty of foreign residents, and of the climax reached 
by these demonstrations in a night-attack on the 
British Legation, which he strongly suspected the 
Japanese Government of having connived at. Sir R. 
Alcock says,* on 9th July 1861 : 

" One explanation" (of these acts), " and the most usual sup- 
plied by the GoYernment and its agents, is this : the traditional 
policy of the country for nearly three centuries had been one of 
absolute exclusion and isolation ; it had taken root in the hearts 
of the people ; and under this policy they and their ancestors had 
been happy, prosperous, and undisturbed. Moved by various con- 
siderations" (the nature of which has above been described by 
the writer), " suggested first by the Dutch, and afterwards urged 
upon them by the Americans, the governing powers in an evil 
liour had been induced to make a sudden and violent change, ad- 
mitting foreigners and their trade, with diplomatic relations and 
free intercourse ; thus reversing all the traditions of the country. 
Since then nothing but trouble and danger had resulted. The 
demands of foreign trade were far beyond the resources of the 
•country ; hence increased dearness of every article of native con- 
sumption, public discontent, and suffering among the masses 
impoverished by what the party who entered into the treaty vainly 
hoped would lead to their enrichment, until at last there is but 
-one cry : to banish the foreigner as he was expelled before, and 
to let them be at peace, with plenty in their houses." 

This was written two years after the signature 
of Lord Elgin's treaty ; and nothing can be more 
significant than the complaint, almost pathetic in its 
litter hopelessness, uttered by the foreign ministers 
of the Tycoon themselves in reference to the attempts 
which the rest of the Western world was making to 
follow in the wake of America and Great Britain. " On 

'^ Blue-book on Japan, 1862. 



ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 499 

my referring" (says Sir Rutherford*) "to Belgium, 
the Governor who spoke counted the existing treaty 
Powers on his fingers, and added : ' With these five 
we find dearness and scarcity already resulting from 
foreign trade, with daily increasing difficulties ; what 
then is to become of us if new countries are to be 
added to the list ? " 

Since the time when these words were spoken, 
the Japanese have had further opportunities of experi- 
encing the salutary influence of foreign intercourse in 
the bombardment of Kagosima and the creation of 
internal dissensions, which appear by recent accounts 
to have at length kindled into open civil war. There 
have been moments indeed when the force of the 
national feeling has been so strong, that the Govern- 
ment has seemed about to enter on a bolder policy, 
and, in the spirit of Taiko-Sama and his successors, 
openly revoke the privileges accorded to foreigners. 
One example of this will suffice. In June 1863 the 
British and other foreign agents received from the 
Tycoon's Minister of Foreign Afi'airs the following 
notice : "I hereby communicate the following in 
writing. Because the feelings of the inhabitants (of 
Japan) are inimical to foreign intercourse, I have 
received orders from His Majesty the Tycoon, now 
residing at Kioto" (or, as expressed according to ano- 
ther translation, " orders of the Tycoon received from 
Kioto, i. e. from the Mikado") "to remove foreigners 
and close the ports, leavmg the negotiations of it in 
my hands. "f This determination, it should be ob- 
served, was arrived at by the Japanese Government 
immediately after they had, under the guns of the 
British admiral Kuper, paid the full indemnity of 

^ Blue-book on Japan, 1860. f Ibid. 1864, pp. 74, 75. 



500 ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 

110,000/. demanded for the injuries to British subjects. 
Its significance is therefore greater, as it shows th^t 
the Japanese entertained hopes that, after the costly 
sacrifice which they had just made, they might induce 
the foreigners to retire with their spoil without danger 
of further hostility. How far they were mistaken, and 
what has since prevented them from carrying out their 
determination of closing these ports, is plain enough 
from the reply to the above despatch given by the Bri- 
tish Minister, Col. Neale, which concludes as follows : 

" The undersigned in the mean while has to inform your Excel- 
lency, with a view that you may bring the same to the knowledge 
of His Majesty the Tycoon, who will doubtless make the same known 
to the Mikado, that the indiscreet communication now made through 
your Excellency is unparalleled in the history of all nations, civi- 
lised or uncivilised; that it is in fact a declaration of war by Japan 
itself against the whole of the treaty Powers; and the consequence 
of which, if not at once arrested, it will have speedily to expiate 
by the severest and most merited chastisement." 

Enough has been said to show generally the cir- 
cumstances under which our treaty relations with 
Japan have been originated and sustained. It would 
be extraordinary indeed if the situation had not been 
fruitful in other difiiculties of eVery kind. Such 
difficulties there certainly have been in abundance, 
and from the first : difficulties about the site stipulated 
for as a foreign settlement at Kanagawa, difficulties as 
to coinao'e, difficulties as to the ratification of the 
treaty by the Tycoon (besides the graver difficulty 
as to the Mikado's sanction), difficulties as to the 
residence of our minister at Jeddo, and difficulties 
as to the terms on which he was to be received 
at the court of the Tycoon. These have all sprung 
out of the very terms of the treaty itself; and the 
strongest proof of their vexatious and overwhelm- 



ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 501 

ing character, as well as of the complete extmction 
of the sangume anticipations formed at the time of 
its first signature, is to be found in the fact that 
in June 1862, Her Majesty's Government consented, 
in compliance with the representations both of their 
own minister in Japan and of the Japanese envoys 
despatched to Europe, to defer for a period of five 
years, to commence from the 1st of January 1863, 
the fulfilment of those portions of the od article of 
the treaty between Great Britain and Japan, of the 
26th of August 1858, which provide for the openmg 
to British subjects of the port of i^eegata, or some 
other convenient j^ort on the West Coast of Nippon 
on 1st of Januar}' 1860, and of the port of Hiogo on 
1st of January 1863, and for the residence of British 
subjects in the city of Jeddo from 1st of January 
1862, in the city of Osaca from 1st of January 1863.* 
The lano;uao'e in which Lord Russell summarises 
the result of his interview with the Japanese envoys 
deserves notice, even after all that has already been 
quoted to the same efi'ect. 

" The general tenor of that communication was such as Mr. 
Alcock's despatches might have led me to expect. . . . They 
dwelt . . on the opposition of the influential classes on the 
one hand, and of the poor on the other; the latter being influenced 
more particularly by the augmented price of the necessaiies of life 
resulting from the export trade carried on by foreigners."t 

But there is another class of difficulties occupy- 
ing a very important share of the Japanese diplomatic 
correspondence, which owes its origin rather to the 
conduct of individuals of either nation than to the 
action of their governments. It would be foreign 

^ Blue-book on Japan, 1863, p. 8. f Ibid. 1863, p. 5. 



502 ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 

to the abstract and general character of this Essay to 
enter into the details of these unfortunate transactions. 
It must be admitted that in dealing with them our 
Government has been from the first beset with per- 
plexities of the most embarrassing nature. Our 
foreign ministers may be pardoned for thinking that 
they could not have abandoned altogether their duty 
of protecting the persons and property of British 
agents and subjects in Japan, without rendering im- 
possible the maintenance of any foreign settlement 
whatever, and ignominiously surrendering to private 
lawlessness and, violence what had been strenuously 
refused to the representatives of the national autho- 
rity. But their mode of enforcing this claim to pro- 
tection has unfortunately been one which is almost 
peculiar to this country in its relations with weaker 
states. The offences committed by individual sub- 
jects of other countries against the persons or pro- 
perty of British residents are left to the judgment of 
the national tribunals ; and we should be astonished 
to hear of demands of indemnity in money from 
any European Government because it had not suc- 
ceeded in apprehending or punishing the offenders. 
But in the case of Japan the matter is very differently 
regarded. The acts of individual Japanese which 
have been subjects of complaints are no doubt trace- 
able to a deep-seated hatred of foreigners among all 
classes of the nation, for which the Government is in 
no way responsible, and which is continually inten- 
sified and brought out into action by that contemptu- 
ous disregard for all national customs and prejudices 
but their own for which English colonists are always 
and every where so notorious and conspicuous. Yet 
in no case have these acts been either defended or 



ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 503 

palliated by the Japanese rulers. They have m many 
instances succeeded in bringing the criminals to jus- 
tice; and in others the plea which the Tycoon's 
ministers have adduced of his inability to control or 
punish the powerful independent Daimios and their ad- 
herents has been admitted as true by all our diplomatic 
agents. Of this plea no one who has read what has 
preceded will, it is hoped, doubt the substantial cor- 
rectness. It would therefore have been a course more 
consistent Avith those international usages of Europe 
by which we have always pretended to decide the ques- 
tion, as well as more likely to promote the ends which 
Great Britain professed to have in ^dew in her inter- 
course with Japan, if these representations of the Ja- 
panese Government had been in the first instance ac- 
cepted, and if we had trusted to the effects of time and 
experience to enlighten the various sections of the na- 
tion as to the real motives and results of our policy, and 
thus gradually to produce among them a better state of 
feeling. But how different have been the measures 
actually taken ! As indemnity for the murder of one 
Englishman and the wounding of two others by the 
armed retainers of one of the Daimios whose power and 
independence was best known, we exacted by the open 
menace of a hostile fleet an indemnity of 1 10,000/. from 
the government of the Tycoon, who had professed 
their desire and their inability to overtake the offender 
in his own territory ; while at the same time the actual 
incompetence of that Government to compel the prince 
of Satsuma to account for the conduct of his depend- 
ents was practically acknowledged by a separate claim 
made upon him for 25,000/. and the immediate execu- 
tion of all implicated in the murder, and among them 
of his own father. That in enforcing this demand 



504 ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 

our fleet should have bombarded and totally destroyed 
the populous city of Kagosuna, and inflicted a loss of 
1,500 lives and 1,000,000/. worth of property, ex- 
cited at the time surprise and indignation. And all 
this appears to have been fully justified in the judg- 
ment of those who directed the operation by the re- 
markable success of this great naval achievement, 
and the signal vindication which was afforded to the 
outraged honour and prestige of Great Britain ! On 
this point there need be no controversy. The senti- 
mental gratification which such a spectacle can give 
need not be grudged to those who can enjoy it. But 
to descend to the lower ground of expediency, it may 
be inquired, whether any thing could have been de- 
vised less likely to overcome those national prejudices 
against foreigners, which our diplomatic agents have 
always admitted to be at the root of all these difficul- 
ties, or more directly calculated to alienate any fa- 
vourable sentiments which may be entertained by any 
party in Japan, and to exasperate by every considera- 
tion of national pride and honour the hostile senti- 
ments already entertained by the majority of the in- 
habitants. It would probably be unfair in an operation 
of this kind to criticise too minutely each successive 
step which those engaged were led by circumstances 
to take. The real responsibility for the conduct of 
military and naval commanders, provided it is not 
contrary to the ordinary rules of warfare, rests on 
those by whose instructions they are guided; instruc- 
tions which appear to me in this instance not to have 
been more than fully executed. I forbear therefore to 
pass any judgment on those proceedings of Admiral 
Kuper, which were at the time the subject of so much 
animadversion both in Parliament and in the country. 



ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 505 

But the defence offered for the policy of the minister 
who directed the expedition requires a closer ex- 
amination, inasmuch as it contains the gist of the 
whole question at issue as to our relations with 
Japan. 

The alleged motive and best justification for the 
demand made on the Japanese Government of repa- 
ration for the murder of Mr. Richardson, was, no 
doubt, the belief, on the part of the English Foreign 
Office, that the Tycoon and his ministers, by feeling 
themselves the consequences of such outrages by 
their subjects, would be led to take more effectual 
steps to prevent their recurrence by prompter appre- 
hension and punishment of the offenders. We may 
set aside for the present the unfairness, so clear as 
to appear almost self-evident when pointed out, of 
holding a government responsible for the act of its 
subject, and at the same time directing warlike 
operations against that subject as an independent 
Power. But the point to be attended to is the 
mutual relation of the two countries which is implied 
in the existence of such a necessity for forcing a 
government to put into execution its own municipal 
laws in favour of foreigners. If the Japanese rulers 
had really done their best to restrain and punish 
their subjects, then our conduct was in the highest 
degree unjust and inexcusable. But if they were 
sheltering and protecting the criminals, this is in 
itself a convincing proof that they shared the senti- 
ments which actuated them in the perpetration of 
their crime. It is incredible that if, with the power 
to punish the murderers of Mr. Richardson, they ab- 
stained from doing so, they could have had any other 
motive than the desire to break off alL intercourse 



506 ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 

with Great Britain. The real object then of the de- 
mand enforced by Admiral Kuper was to give Japan 
a practical proof of the consequences which would 
follow, if she attempted to shake herself loose from 
her treaty obligations and return to that happy posi- 
tion of isolation which she so fondly regretted. It 
was, in fact, logically consistent with the whole sys- 
tem of intimidation by which foreign intercourse had 
been originally imposed upon the country. Who can 
doubt that our ministers would have been contented 
with the first apologies of the Japanese Government, 
and its alleged efforts to punish the offenders, if they 
had not believed that the whole transaction was part 
of a scheme, at least connived at by that govern- 
ment, by which it was hoped to make Japan a resi- 
dence too perilous even for the adventurous enter- 
prise of British merchants? And what does this 
hope, if it be really true that it was entertained, 
show, but that, to use the words of Lord liussell him- 
self, "if war is made to enforce a commercial treaty, 
we run the risk of engaging in protracted hostilities, 
and of earning a reputation for quarrelling with every 
nation in the East" ?* 

At every step of our investigation we are thrown 
back upon the general question which lies at the root 
of all our difficulties in Japan : Have we a right to 
hold the Japanese, by the constant employment of 
menace and intimidation, to the terms of the engage- 
ment which was extorted from them in 1859, and 
from which they have ever since evinced a constant 
desire to be freed? It is certainly very much open 
to question, whether, even when judged by our stan- 
dard of international usage, they could ever be con- 

* Blue-book on Japan, 1860, p. 98. 



ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 507 

sidered bound by a contract for which, in their esti- 
mation at least, they have never received any con- 
sideration, and which was in its origin vitiated by 
compulsion and intimidation. But, however this may 
be, there can be no doubt that subsequent events 
would well justify them in repudiating it altogether. 
They have already experienced from it two of the 
greatest calamities which can overtake a nation — 
scarcity of the necessaries of life, and foreign inva- 
sion; and there is a heavier calamity still, the near 
approach of which they are able to foresee. Civil war, 
to which the country has been a stranger during the 
whole period since the last expulsion of foreigners, has 
again broken out, and the revolutionary influence of 
the Western world threatens their whole national 
system with the imminent peril of disorganisation. 
The interests, then, which the two nations have at 
stake are not such as to redress the inequality of the 
original compact. The whole national life of Japan 
is imperilled; while if the worst happens to Great 
Britain, she mil but lose those pecuniary profits of 
her merchants, which, it might be supposed, are too 
dearly purchased by the nation at the expense of a 
constant series of petty quarrels, out of which neither 
honour nor advantage can possibly be acquired. 

The early European discoverers of this distant em- 
pire could indeed plead nobler excuses for their ill- 
fated conduct. In the first enthusiasm kindled by the 
PTcat maritime discoveries of their as^e, the Jesuit 
missionaries conceived the glorious and not unrea- 
sonable hope of adding Japan as another precious 
link to the island chain of churches with which the 
Eoman See had already almost girdled the globe. 
But our colder age and country has learnt by dis- 



508 ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 

heartening experience to abandon such great and be- 
neficent projects. When we have totally failed under 
circumstances so much more favourable in India, we 
can hardly expect to succeed in Japan, where the 
name of Christian proselytism has long been associ- 
ated with so many memories of national animosity and 
misfortune. For propagandism by violence, however 
excusable in a Catholic of the 16th century, no Eng- 
lishman of the 19th can plead the apology of ignorance 
or fanaticism. If we were to judge from the history 
of the last thousand years, it would appear to show that 
the permanent area of Christianity is conterminous 
with that of Western civilisation, and that its doctrines 
could find acceptance only among those who, by incor- 
poration into the Greek and Latin races, have adopted 
their system of life and morals. In Japan its recep- 
tion would be attended with the peculiar difficulty of 
having to contend with prejudices and fears indis- 
solubly connected with the national faith and go- 
vernment. 

But, however this may be, the excuse of propa- 
gandism for our national policy is one that has never 
been seriously urged by those who are responsible 
for it. If we have not stooped to the ignominy of 
the Dutch merchants, who purchased their paltry 
privileges by the open desecration of the symbols of 
their faith, and an active cooperation in the massacre 
of its adherents, we have prudently kept any scheme 
of evangelisation quite in the background. It is in 
the interests of Commerce, and not of Christianity, 
that we have avowedly acted in Japan. Our policy 
has been dictated by no higher motive than a de- 
sire to find a market for the wares of Manchester 
and Birmingham. And in this our success has 



ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 509 

hitherto hardly been proportioned to our efforts. 
Whether the simphcity of the mode of life of the 
Japanese, and the extraordinary fewness of their 
wants, will ever be so far altered as to allow of the 
creation of a factitious demand for foreign commo- 
dities, depends on the course which events ultimately 
take in the countr}^ But at any rate there is at 
present no sign of any such revolution in the national 
tastes and manners. The long experience of the 
complete failure of the Dutch colony in their patient 
efforts to find any native market for European mer- 
chandise might originally have been a warning 
against too sanguine anticipations;, and the statistics 
of foreign trade since the treaty show that, as 
Ksempfer long ago observed, Japan is too capable 
of supplying all its own wants to make an import 
trade either large or profitable. It is apparently 
only in one export that the returns show any con- 
siderable or increasing trade. The Japanese silks 
alone have established their place among the staple 
commodities of the European market. It is true that 
what profits are to be got out of Japanese trade are 
mainly monopolised by our own merchants. But 
this is no more than occurs almost everywhere where 
British capital, energy, and commercial talent are 
brought into competition with those of other nations. 
Whatever progress may eventually be made towards 
stimulating the commercial tastes and activity of the 
Japanese, can only be by slow degrees. It is not by 
involving the country in war and revolution, and so 
shutting up the springs of commerce at their sources, 
that we shall succeed either in removing the preju- 
dice which has already been created by the scarcity 
and dearness which foreign trade has brought upon 



510 ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 

the less wealthy classes, or in persuading the rulers 
to relax the restrictions which their fears have im- 
posed on our intercourse. 

But it is said, though our present policy is neither 
just to the Japanese nor favourable to either of the two 
great motives which might furnish it with excuse and 
impulse, yet still there is another consideration which 
binds us to its maintenance. This argument, as drawn 
from our national pride, has always been very power- 
ful both in its direct influence on those of our states- 
men who inherit the traditions of an effete foreign 
policy, and indirectly when employed as an appeal 
to popular prejudices and passions. To moderate the 
tone of our diplomatic intercourse with Japan would, 
it is urged, involve an immediate loss of our prestige 
throughout the East, and leave a field of operation 
to other Powers, especially to Eussia and America, 
of which they would at once avail themselves. But 
the fact is, that both these nations have already made 
much more real progress in Japan than ourselves, by 
the adoption of a policy very different from our own, 
and that it is they rather who are likely to benefit by 
our persistence in our present course. The Ameri- 
cans have from the very first availed themselves of 
the ambitious designs which the Japanese impute to 
Great Britain, in order to lead them to regard the 
United States as their best friend and ally. It was by 
adroitly urging the imminent danger from our expedi- 
tion against China that they induced the government 
of the Tycoon to consent to the compromise of the 
first commercial treaty ; and ever since, in every diffi- 
culty and dispute in which our diplomatists have been 
involved, the Americans have not only held aloof, 
but have been most anxious to let the Japanese see 



ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 511 

that they shared in none of our attempts to enforce 
commercial rights by force and intimidation. They 
no doubt feel assured that if our aggressive policy 
prove ultimately successful in opemng the coun- 
try, their merchants will not be long in obtaining 
their share of the profits; whereas if we fail, they 
will escape all the odium and risk to which we ex- 
pose ourselves. As to Russia, we know that the 
neighbourhood of her vast military empire has al- 
ready impressed the Japanese with such a conviction 
of her power, that she is the only foreign nation for 
whom they entertain any real respect. And this re- 
spect, as in China, Eussia prefers to secure by the 
slower and surer process of such indirect influence, 
rather than by any open attacks on the independence 
of the native government. The declaration made on 
one occasion, " that Russia does not sell the lives of 
her citizens," points to a more dignified and far-seeing 
line of action than that which Great Britain has pur- 
sued at the dictation of her commercial classes. The 
interests of Russia in this part of the world are so 
much closer than ours, that she may well pause before 
she compromises them for the sake of either commercial 
treaties or money indemnities. 

The examples, then, of Russia and America may 
well serve as models for the imitation of our statesmen, 
if they still seriously cling to the doctrine of the neces- 
sity of keeping up British ascendency in the far East. 
But surely this object is itself at once worthless 
and unattainable. The idea that the extension of 
trade depends on military or naval supremacy be- 
longs to the political creed of a past age, when it was 
thought possible for a nation permanently to mono- 
polise the commerce of its dependencies. And Japan 



512 ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 

under Eussian rule would probably be in a position 
far more favourable to our real interests than it could 
be, if our present policy proved ever so successful. 
If that country is fated to be brought within the circle 
of Western civilisation, this will in all probability be 
effected by its absorption into the Russian empire : 
a process which would supply just that transitional 
stage through which the changes which are necessary 
for our ends might most gradually and safely be ef- 
fected. Our mercantile class would thus eventually 
derive from their intercourse mth the country all 
those advantages which their present short-sighted 
and premature efforts are jeopardising. 

What, then, is 'the practical conclusion to which 
our argument has brought us? Is it proposed that 
Great Britain should at once formally abandon her 
treaty relations with Japan, withdraw her diplomatic 
agents, and break off the trade which her merchants 
have succeeded in establishing ? By no means. What 
is really necessary is, first, that we should abstain 
from all attempts not only to wrest further commer- 
cial concessions from the native Government, but even 
to maintain those already made, by any menace 
of hostility or demonstration of armed force; and 
secondly, that the instructions of our Foreign Office 
should impress most distinctly on the minds of its 
representatives in Japan that their chief duty is to 
prevent and arrange any differences which may arise 
between the native Government, populations, and 
British subjects resident in the country. The whole 
foundation on which we rest our present claim to any 
international privileges in Japan is radically unsound; 
and the original vice of the treaty of 1859 can never 
be cured by a persistence in the course which has 



ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 513 

hitherto perpetuated that defect through every sub- 
sequent transaction. It must no longer be on what 
^ye then extorted from the Japanese Government, but 
on what they are now willmg to grant as an equiva- 
lent for the advantages we on our part have to offer 
them, that we must rely for the maintenance or ad- 
vance of our commercial intercourse ; and our coun- 
trymen in the East must learn the necessity before 
all things of conciliating the goodwill of the native 
Goverinnent and population by the manifestation of 
the virtues of self-control, moderation, and respect for 
the laws and institutions of the land in which they ex- 
pect security and protection. These qualities, if it be in 
vain to look for them among the reckless adventurers 
who at present swarm in Yokohama and Shanghae, 
are not, it is to be hoped, quite extinct among the 
general body of our commercial classes. It is by this 
course alone that there is any reasonable expectation 
that the Japanese may in course of time forget their 
animosity to foreigners, when they no longer see 
in them either invaders intent on schemes of con- 
quest, or revolutionists who, like their own "lo- 
mns," freed from all moral and social ties, threaten 
with dissolution the whole fabric of national order 
and prosperity. It was not by warlike demonstra- 
tions or open defiance of the native Governments 
that our merchants laid the first foundation of their 
Indian empire ; for the violent measures which even- 
tually proved successful must inevitably have failed, 
if the first footing had not been secured by very dif- 
ferent means. Should this change of policy even 
prove to have come too late, and the Japanese Go- 
vernment, released from the bondage of intimidation, 
take the improbable, but not impossible, step of ex- 

LL 



514 ENGLAND AND JAPAN. 

eluding us altogether from their ports, the lesson of 
the fate of the premature attempts of the sixteenth 
century may reconcile us to this temporary dis- 
appointment of our hopes ; for had the progress of 
the Portuguese been less rapid, it would certainly 
have been more lasting, and Europe would not have 
felt the effects during three centuries of reactionary 
exclusion. And in Japan England has neither re- 
sponsibilities or interests sufficient, to justify a policy 
which might be inevitable in India or excusable in 
China. In both these countries we have advanced 
too far to be able to retire altogether mthout dis- 
honour. But in Japan the path of duty and advan- 
tage lie as yet in one direction. The obstacles op- 
posed by the peculiar institutions and past history 
of the country are such as can only be overcome by 
time and patience. And the importance of the in- 
terests immediately involved in a check to our com- 
merce is quite inadequate to excuse any departure 
from the only policy which promises any permanent 
success. In any event, justice and expediency alike 
demand that the honour of Great Britain be no 
longer imperilled by association with measures which, 
attach to her all the odium of a policy of aggression 
and conquest, and are palliated by no connection with 
any comprehensive or beneficent schemes of empire 
or civilisation. 

CHAKLES ALFRED COOKSON. 



No. VII. 



ENGLAND 



AJTD 



THE UNCIVILISED COmiUNITIES. 



BY 



HENRY DIX HUTTOK 



" The ascendency of England more especially affects the non-European 
and backward populations. As regards these above all, it is essen- 
tial to transform British preponderance, the special benefits of 
which are not incompatible with an oppressive influence too gene- 
rally felt even in the most favourable cases. It manifests itself in 
an excessive regard for mere material interests. These, however, 
ought not to preponderate among nations any more than for indi- 
viduals, since their legitimate satisfaction in no way requires a cor- 
rupting ascendency, which tends to perpetuate War in the name of 
Industry." Auguste Comte, Systeme de Politique Positive, torn. iv. 
pp. 490, 494. 

" Venimmo al punto dove si digrada : 

Quivi trovammo Pluto il gran nemico." 

La Divina Commedia, Inf. c. vi. 

"" It is not enough to have a good understanding : the essential matter 
is to possess a good Method." Descartes. 



i 



ENGLAND 



A2TD 



THE UNCIVILISED COIMMUNITIES.* 



1. Introductory remarks. 2. Savage and Civilised communities ; their 
characteristics and relations. 3. Primitive Society and Western 
Europe. 4. England and her relations with savage and semi- 
civilised communities. 5. The Colonies as intermediate links be- 
tween England and savage and semi- civilised communities. 6. 
The Cape of Good Hope and New Zealand, with maps. 7. Con- 
cluding remarks. 

I. Intkoductory Reiviarks. 

No view of the foreign policy of England could be 
complete which did not include her relations with 
savao-e and semi-civilised communities. The otow- 
ing humanity and advancing science of our age call 
for and facilitate such a review, which is rendered 
imperative by the dangers of a one-sided philan- 

* The following works may be generally consulted on the subjects 
of the present essay : 

Report of Select Committee (House of Commons) upon the Abori- 
gines in British Settlements, — Parliamentary Papers, 1836, vol. vii. ; 
ib. 1837, vol. vii. Aborigines, Australian Colonies, — Pari. Papers, vol. 
xxxiv. No. 627. Cost of Colonies to Imperial Exchequer, 1853-7, 
both inclusive, — Pari. Papers, 1859, vol. xvii. No. 240. Colonisation 
of India, — Pari. Papers, vol. iv. Report of Select Committee on 
Colonial Military Expenditure,— Pari. Papers, 1861, vol. xiii. No. 423. 
Annual Register, 1862, vol. civ., Colonial Census, 1860-1. Statistical 
Tables relating to the Colonial and other Possessions of the United 



518 ENGLAND AND 

thropy, and still more by a superficial philosophy 
of despair. At present the public mind oscillates 
between the suggestions of sympathy, and the con- 
tradictions seemingly given to these by experience. 
Yet the former are nearer the truth than the latter, 
and they would become far more so, if the advocates 
of a noble cause could brmg themselves to take a 
rational and practical view of its real and great diffi- 
culties. 

These difficulties spring in part from the subject 
itself, but still more from our mode of dealing with 
it. The beneficial action of civilised on uncivilised 
man requires a careful and impartial appreciation of 
the points of difference as well as those of similitude. 
A fair and relative estimate both of the good qualities 
of untutored man, and of his serious deficiencies, diffi- 
cult as such an estimate is rendered by the Avant of 
trustworthy information, becomes unattainable through 
the absence of a just method and systematic concep- 
tions. So long as the extraordinary phenomena of 
the material world were alone or even chiefly re- 
garded, science had no existence, the practical arts 
languished. In the hands of Franklin the lightning 
might indeed reveal the presence of law, but the 
science of electricity and the electric telegraph 



Kingdom, — Pari. Papers, 1864. Army and Navy Estimates, — Pari. 
Papers, 1865, 1866. Vattel's Law of Nations. Kent's Commentaries, 
7tli edition, vol. iii. pp. 458-86, — International rights as to discovery, 
lands of savage tribes, &c. Earl Grey, the Colonial Policy of the Ad- 
ministration of Lord John Russell. Martin, Statesman's Year-book 
for 1865 and 1866. A. Mills, Colonial Constitutions ; and see an article 
in the North British Review, 1860, vol. xxxiii. Our Colonies, — North 
British Review, 1862, vol. xxxvi. Bannister's British Colonisation and 
Coloured Races. Duval, Les Colonies Fran9aises. Duval, Histoire de 
I'Emigration. Groldwin Smith, The Empire. Auguste Comte, Systeme 
de PoHtique Positive. 



THE UNCIVILISED COINIJMUNITIES. 519 

sprang from facts known only to the observant few. 
So likewise in the social world. It would be vain 
to expect that a transient excitement of the British 
public, incident upon Kafir or Maori wars, or Jamaica 
insurrections, could lead to any permanent good re- 
sults. The present danger gone by, affairs resume 
their old course; and so they will continue to do, 
with the like results, until human sentiments which 
do honour to those who feel and make them felt, 
go hand in hand with scientific conceptions and a 
rational policy. 

The most essential condition of such a policy is, 
I beheve, a change, both intellectual and moral, in 
our habitual 2^oint of view. I shall therefore com- 
mence by ofi'ering some general ideas, stating them 
as fully as the limits of an essay permit, and illus- 
trating them by referring to actual cases. This more 
abstract treatment will embrace, first, the leading 
characteristics of Savage and Ci^dlised communities 
and their mutual action; secondly, the historic re- 
lations between Primitive Society and Western Eu- 
rope; thirdly, the special relations which connect 
England with Savage and Semi- civilised communi- 
ties; fourthly, the Colonies as intermediate links. 

The views thus submitted have, it is thought, an 
independent value and philosophic interest. They are, 
however, mainly put forward in the belief of their 
practical utility, as pointing to a more just and ra^ 
tional policy in our dealings with savage and semi- ci- 
vilised communities. The truest principles can never 
supersede real statesmanship. Nevertheless, general 
conceptions about history, society, and man, are most 
imjDortant as facilitating the adoption and persistent 
execution of measures just in themselves, and framed 



520 ENGLAND AND 

with special reference to actual circumstances. In 
no case more clearly than the present is there 
greater scope for a policy at once large in conception 
and flexible in its applications. I shall endeavour to 
prove this with reference to the English colonies 
generally, and in a more special sense as regards the 
Cape of Good Hope and New Zealand. 

II. Savage and Civilised Communities ; theie Cha- 

EACTERISTICS AND MuTUAL EeLATIONS. 

The popular idea of a savage is chiefly associated 
with an external barbarism and superstitious notions 
of a low order. The cessation or diminished influ- 
ence of these is commonly made the test of progress 
towards civilisation. But such a test, though no 
doubt to some extent just, is quite inadequate, and 
leads to serious practical errors, raising expectations 
doomed to disappointment, and preventing measures 
of real urgency. The points of difl'erence which 
separate savage from civilised existence lie much 
deeper, and concern fundamental aspects of the in- 
tellectual and moral nature and social institutions. 
This juster appreciation also brings into clearer view 
the attributes of our common humanity. The ex- 
aggerated importance often assigned to the question 
of races is thus reduced to its just proportions, and 
subordinated to conceptions at once more general, 
and afl'ecting matters which fall to a far greater ex- 
tent within the modifying power of a thoughtful and 
wisely-directed human intervention ; as for example, 
the conditions of domestic well-being, laws affecting 
property, industry, and the administration of justice, 
mth popular education. The deeper points of con- 



THE UNCIVILISED COMMUNITIES. 521 

trast, when impartially investigated, are seen to be 
due, not chiefly to physical conformation, but to social 
influences, slowly accumulating, and transmitted from 
generation to generation. They connect themselves, 
for good or for evil, with a long train of antecedents, 
and constitute stages in the general growth of so- 
ciety. And, in truth, reversing the process, the 
lower strata of the civiHsed existence, amidst which 
we live, present too much that calls to mind the 
fundamental characteristics of savage communities. 
The advanced nations of Western Europe, mthout 
exception, contain at this moment masses whose 
domestic condition is little, if at all, raised above 
Xomadism, and presents even less than the ordinary 
comfort and decency of savage life ; while their spiri- 
tual wants are much less cared for than those of 
Africa and Patagonia. Politically regarded, do not 
our immense standing armies, with such practical 
commentaries as a " Treaty of Vienna" and a " Gas- 
tein Convention," savour of a civilised barbarism, 
differing by little else than a false glitter from real 
savagery ? 

The contrasts between civilised and savao:e life 
commence with the fundamental elements of society 
— the Family and Property. 

Primitive domesticity is characterised by poly- 
gamy, and the slavery (real or virtual) of vnfe and 
child. Generally speaking, the serious difficulties 
thus raised are aggravated by unjust and injudi- 
cious treatment. Institutions become natural to 
civilised man, and sanctioned by inflexible dogmas, 
lead the missionary to attempt changes which are 
morally and socially premature. Apparent success 
often disguises real failure; for savages are deeply 



522 ENGLAND AND 

influenced by custom and tradition, while the feeble- 
ness of their social organisation and their respect for 
the intellectual superiority of the white teacher dis- 
poses them to yield a passive obedience. In more 
strongly organised communities, however, the resist- 
ance is greater, and then a conflict arises between 
usage and innovation. This frequently creates a 
new and serious danger, the missionary invoking 
the support of the political power. Such an inter- 
vention may be legitimate, if shuply used to pre- 
vent violence and the manifest abuse of domestic 
authority. Yet even here the magistrate can do 
little without the moral support of the native popu- 
lation, and such support can only gradually be ob- 
tained, while it is compromised by inflexible prescrip- 
tions which make the disregard of social duties the 
test of religious sincerity. A striking example of 
this twofold difficulty, moral and political, has arisen 
among the Zulu-Kafir tribes in Natal. The remark- 
able discussion in that colony on the toleration of 
polygamy, as regards natives married before conver- 
sion, evinces some disposition among missionaries to 
adopt more humane and wiser views. On the other 
hand, the experience thus obtained proves that a 
just sense of the difficulties attending the interven- 
tion of the magistrate, far from hindering, insures 
real progress. The following extracts illustrate this 
position. 

Dr. Colenso observes on the first point :* 

" It is not tlie purity, the charity, the piety, which the Grospel 
enjoins — it is not this only which makes the untaught native 

* Letter upon the proper Treatment of Cases of Polygamy, 2d 
edit. 1862, p. 75, See also the observations of the Secretary for Native 
Affairs in the colony of Natal, ib. p. 88. 



THE UNCIVILISED CO^IMUNITIES. 523 

shrink, ^ith dislike and distrust, from the nearer approach of a 
missionary. But here the mind of the savage — the best instincts 
of his nature — his sense of duty to his vdres and children — his 
regard for the peace and welfare of his family — will take part 
with his ignorance and selfishness and evil passions in repelling 
the advances of the Christian teacher. The natives, as a body, 
dread any closer contact with a religion which, if it takes effect 
at all among them, is to tear up at once, as they suppose, their 
family hearths, rend asunder the dearest ties which bind them to 
one another, and fill their tribes with disorder and confusion." 

The second or political difficulty is well illustrated 
in a report tvMcIi contains a very interesting and com- 
plete view of the state of the natives in the colony of 
Natal, and the mode of dealing with them adopted 
by the Government. The Secretary for IN'ative Af- 
fairs observes as follows :* 

" Polygamy is an ancient institution among the native tribes. 
They say they were created with it, and it is still practised among 
them. It is a system with which, of necessity, all their laws, 
customs, habits, and ideas are bound up. It is one which time 
only can abrogate, because men and women would equally oppose 
any violent attempt to destroy it, and morality would suffer more 
from the effects of such violence than leaving it to the gradual 
extirpation which natural causes and judicious but indirect mea- 
sures will most probably soon bring about. The Lieutenant- G-o- 
vernor, in his capacity of supreme chief, has already made serious 
modifications in regard to it. One is, that every marriage shall 
be final as regards the parents of the gui ; and the other, that 
a widow may marry whom she pleases, without reference to her 
guardians. These are two very important alterations in their 
old customs, and because they were reasonable the natives have 
quietly acquiesced in them. Further innovations will undoubtedly 
be made as opportunity offers, with the view of effectually but 
judiciously checking polygamy. One of these has for some time 
been contemplated; that is, to make the legality of every native 
marriage depend upon a full and clear declaration at the time by 

■■' Pari, Papers, 1864, No. 9127, Eeport on Colonial Possessions, 
part 2, Natal ; Report by the Secretary for Native Affairs, p. 46. 



524 ENGLAND AND 

the woman of her personal consent. Practically the effect has 
been the same wherever an appeal for protection has been made 
to authority; but as yet it has not been thought prudent to base 
the legality of the marriage upon such specific declaration. The 
importance of this step will be better understood, when it is 
known that before the British Government took possession of 
Natal a father had the power of coercing his child, even to the 
extremity of putting her to death, if she disobeyed him in the 
matter of marriage. Since then, however, no coercion has been 
allowed, and whenever brought to the notice of the authorities 
has been punished. The effect of even this check has caused the 
natives frequently to complain that the women have been made 
their masters." 

The institution of property among savage tribes 
presents little of that individual character and right 
of alienation which enter so largely into civilised 
ownership. In place of these we find a collective 
occupancy and right of temporary user, at most of 
inheritance without any power of disposition. There 
are probably few contrasts more difficult to grasp 
and trace out to their practical results.* Yet com- 
parative jurisprudence,! the history of Roman law, 
and the study of existing tribes, show that the col- 
lective or tribal constitution forms the law of pro- 
perty among primitive communities. IN'or are analo- 
gies wanting among ourselves. Common of pasture J 

^' Thus, when William King said (as alleged), " the Waitara block 
is theirs^'' it was assumed that he admitted that Teira and his tribe had 
a poioer of selling the land, which was an inference not in accordance 
with the customary law of the Maoris. 

-j- This subject is well treated in Mr. Maine's Ancient Law. 

J As a practical illustration of the analogies above remarked be- 
tween the position of uncivilised communities and the humbler classes 
of European nations in relation to their richer and more powerful 
neighbours, compare the observations of M. Casalis [Les Bassouios, 
Cape of Good Hope, north of the English colony, p. 169) on the ag- 
gressions of colonists upon native lands, with those of Professor Faw- 
cett {The Economic Position of the British Labourer^ pp. 62-6) on the 



THE UNCIVILISED COMIViUNITIES. 525 

exceptionally recalls the general rule of primitive 
society; and those who have no toleration for "Ma- 
ori notions about land" might usefully consider 
whether the tenancies at will and strict settle- 
ments sanctioned by British law, do not present 
social disadvantages as serious as, and not very dis- 
similar from, those incident to the tribal institution 
of property. 

This tribal right not merely regards land, but 
cattle, flocks, and other movable property. The 
Kafir tribes of the Cape furnish examples of both;* 
but the case of New Zealand still more strikingly 
shows the practical mischiefs which result from a su- 
perficial appreciation of this fundamental difference. 

When our systematic colonisation began in New 
Zealand' — just twenty-five years ago — the Maoris, 
then numbering about 70,000, were divided into 
numerous clans and tribes. These, inhabiting the 
country for centuries, had portioned out among 
themselves the vast tracts of the great north and 
southf islands, which embraced a territory as large 
as Great Britain and Ireland. Thus there was 
no want of iinoccujpied land, although every part of 
this magnificent waste, no less than the small por- 



gradual invasion of ancient rights of commonage — admitting, as he 
justly points out, of no equivalent pecuniary compensation — in the 
nineteenth century by British landowners. 

* See, as to land, Casalis,ies Bassoutos, p. 167 ; as to cattle. Grout, 
Zulu-Land, and Colenso on Polygamy, p. 91. The latter writer 
points out the singular and grave mistakes into which Europeans are 
led with respect to native marriages by confounding the tribal with 
an individual right of property. 

■f This is often called the " Middle Island ;" but the southermost 
of the three islands which constitute New Zealand being compara- 
tively insignificant in extent, is better described as " Stewart Island" 
— a mode of denoting it which is coming into general use. 



526 ENGLAND AND 

tions cultivated by the Maoris, had native claimants 
in the several tribes and their subdivisions. Even 
had not the treaty of Waitangi (1840) expressly re- 
cognised this tribal ownership of New Zealand, a sense 
of justice and the necessity of conciliating the power- 
ful and numerous savages located all round the coast, 
and, generally speaking, at the very places most 
suitable for colonisation,* would have enforced the 
peaceable recognition of native claims by purchase. 
And, in fact, for many years little difficulty was 
found in procuring for nominal sums (from a penny 
to one-and-sixpence per acre) very large tracts or 
blocks. In time, however, the difficulty increased, 
partly owing to the rapid growth of a colonisation 
from the first singularly scattered and dispersive, 
partly from the superior and growing intelligence of 
the aborigines, and the variety of latent claims, f 
some real, others fictitious, which the demand for 
land called into activity among the tribes. 

The difficulty flowing from tribal ownership, as 
affecting the purchase of land and making out the 
title, is the most obvious, but far too exclusively 
considered. It is direct and palpable, and at once 
makes itself felt in relation to colonial interests. 
But gradually and surely there springs up a diffi- 
culty of another and more serious kind, which, dis- 
regarded at the outset, finally produces grave com- 
plications often when least expected. So strongly 
is the native idea of property identified with a mere 
right of user as regards the individual, that the abso- 
lute alienation of tribal land, even of blocks sold to 

* See the Map. 

f Their origin and nature are treated of in Shortland's Traditions 
and Suijerstiiions of the New Zealanders^ chap. xiv. 



THE UNCIVILISED COJOIUNITIES. 527 

the colonial GoTernment, is only comprehended slowly 
and with difficulty. But the land which remains un- 
sold continues subject to the tribal ownership. The 
natives consequently make little or no progress to- 
wards the fundamental conception of modern industry 
and civilisation, namely that of individual property. 
Neither singly, therefore, nor collectively, do they 
advance in material and social well-being, while they 
see the constant progress of a colonial prosperity 
which seems to threaten their very existence. In 
every European settlement a time must come when 
there will no longer be any choice between constant 
collisions ending in war, or a process of incorpora- 
tion ; slow, no doubt, but real and progressive. The 
latter alternative can only be secured, by systematic 
efforts to introduce the fundamental ideas and insti- 
tutions of ci^dlised societv ; and these involve a laro;e 
and continuous expenditure with a view to make the 
natives directly participate in colonial prosperity and 
the benefits of good government. To this end no- 
thing is more important than the gradual transfor- 
mation of tribal into individual ownership, more 
especially as regards the Chiefs of the tribes. The 
difficulty of effecting such a change is no doubt 
great, but a beginning can always be made ; and the 
policy, if judiciously instituted and steadily main- 
tained, would in the end succeed. Without this and 
kindred measures, the world may be delighted with 
highly-coloured pictures of savage races, and their 
alleged civilisation through commerce and religion, 
and discover at last that a certain degree of material 
and mental progress, and even the adoj^tion of Chris- 
tianity so called, may perfectly well coexist with latent 
but unreclaimed barbarism. 



528 ENGLAND AND 

The want of any just and farseeing government 
in New Zealand is strikingly proved by the syste- 
matic neglect of this point down almost to our own 
time; as the following fact, among many others, will 
show :* 

" In selling territories to the Crown («. e. the Colonial Grover- 
nor before the colonists obtained representative institutions and 
self-government), many chiefs made it a condition of sale, that 
Crown grants for certain reserved portions of the territory should 
be issued to them, which would have given them a legal tenure 
and a right to let such lands to settlers, thus providing them- 
selves with an income (and, it may be added, qualifying them at 
a later period, when the constitution was granted in 1853, to 
vote for and sit in the assembly of New Zealand). Legal diffi- 
culties were, however, raised by the colonial law-officers as to such 
grants, and year after year passed without the promises of Govern- 
ment being fulfilled. Soon after Sir George Grey's return (1861), 
his attention was drawn to the subject, and the Government sur- 
veyor was directed to prepare a return of all cases in which 
Crown grants had leen promised dut never issued. So little care 
had been taken by Government to remember its engagements to 
the natives, that two months of unremitted rummaging amongst 
maps and original deeds of cession in the government offices was 
necessary before the tale of our bad faith could be furnished. It 
then appearedf that in no less than 178 cases, some occurring as 
long ago as the year 1848, Crown grants had been promised, and 
the promises had never been fulfilled, and that in 30 of these 
cases Crown grants had actually been stipulated for as part of the 
consideration in the very deeds of cession. Is there any wonder 
that the natives called the Pakeha a humbugging people ?" 

The view thus presented as to the importance of 
systematic efforts to transform tribal into individual 
right (due precautions being taken to protect the 
native from oppression or fraud), though specially 
suggested by New Zealand, is of very general appli- 
cation. It is too often left out of view, even in plans 

* Gorst, The Maori King^ p. 189. 

t New Zealand Parliamentary Papers, 1862, No. 10. 



THE UNCIVILISED COMMUNITIES. 529 

which in other respects possess great merit. I allude 
particularly to the idea of native villages planted on 
Eeserves, kept distinct from colonial property, yet so 
placed as to admit of commercial intercourse, and 
the employment of natives in private and public 
works. Such establishments, if under proper guid- 
ance and control, would afford a valuable means for 
the social amelioration of savage or semi-civilised 
tribes. But both in New Zealand and, I believe, also 
at the Cape of Good Hope (British Kafraria and 
Natal), the native reserves have been allowed to 
remain under the tribal right of occupancy, without 
any attempt having been systematically made to- 
wards the introduction of that primary condition of 
the gradual incorporation of the aborigines with civi- 
lised society — the individualisation of property. 

Since the foundations of society — family and pro- 
perty — thus manifest such marked differences between 
savage and civilised existence, like contrasts may be 
expected to exist in other respects. Accordingly we 
do find among savage or semi-civilised communities 
a marked deviation from each of the three chief fea- 
tures of the modern European civilisation — settled 
Industry, the Church or spiritual government, and 
the State or temporal government. 

In place of regular employment, with its usual 
accompaniment of a fixed home, savage life is cha- 
racterised by Nomadism. This condition is not in- 
deed universal, and it admits of many gradations, 
from the wandering hunter, fisher, or herdsman, to 
the primitive agriculturist. Still, the nomadic tend- 
ency and character may, in a measure, be traced in 
all savage tribes, and even in communities that have 
become partially civilised; though it assumes dif- 



530 ENGLAND AND 

ferent shapes according as they live by flocks or 
herds, or cultivate the land. 

The inherent nomadism of pastoral tribes appears 
to be closely connected with their well-known thievish 
propensities ; a characteristic which has given rise to 
the somewhat hasty generalisation, that all barba- 
rians are robbers. This habitual disregard of the 
rights of movable property was long a source of 
complaint and difficulty in the relations between the 
colonists and the Kafir tribes who inhabited the bor- 
ders of the Cape settlements. But those who com- 
plained hardly considered the temptations held out 
to untutored barbarians by scattered farms of im- 
mense extent, on which the cattle were allowed to 
stray almost unguarded. The system of armed re- 
prisals (known under the name of commandos)^ long 
tolerated, and even sanctioned, by the colonial go- 
vernment, was little calculated to remedy the evil. 
Experience has shown that an effectual remedy can 
only be found in an efficient Armed Police, together 
with better arrangements for the location of farms, 
and a judicious supervision and control over the 
neighbouring tribes. 

But even where the aborigines, as in the case of 
!New Zealand, mainly live by tilling the ground, 
their agriculture itself has a semi-nomadic charac- 
ter, not unfrequently occasioning changes in their 
habitations.* The same plot is cultivated for a few 

* It is worthy of remark that early colonisation manifests tenden- 
cies which are essentially similar to those above alluded to in reference 
to the cultivation of the land. It is not only in slave-cultivated terri- 
tories that we find the colonist exhausting portions of ground, and 
then abandoning them for new soil. It has been specially remarked in 
the case of New Zealand, that the deficiency of capital and the dearness 
of labour combined have led the British settler to demand an extent 



THE UNCIVILISED COMMUNITIES. 531 

years, and when exhausted abandoned for another 
^' cultivation." The tribes also resort for food to 
rivers and forests ; hence, among other reasons, their 
claims over extensive tracts far exceeding the limits 
of their actual occupation. Yet, on the other hand, 
the natural improvidence of savages, together with 
their keen appreciation of the commercial benefits of 
colonisation, disposed the Maoris, especially at first, 
to part mth tribal land for a mere nominal conside- 
ration. The colonists, without imputing to them op- 
pression or rapacity, were naturally anxious to obtain 
land. The Government, while steadily acquiring, 
through the wholesale land-purchase department, the 
cession of extensive tracts, had not the courage or 
the wisdom to insist on applying a considerable por- 
tion of the advanced retail price paid by the settlers 
directly towards the improvement, but especially the 
guidance and control of the natives. Hence the ori- 
ginal and chief source of those disastrous conflicts which 
may be fitly named the Civil Wars of New Zealand. 

These semi-nomadic tendencies have, in other 
ways, produced embarrassments with reference to 
land which could only have been prevented or re- 
medied by a policy at once firm and humane, un- 
happily wanting. Owing to the absence of a settled 
residence savage tribes rarely organise a system of 
conquest. The total instability of the Maori con- 
quests, for example, resulting from the inter-tribal 



of ground much beyond what would be necessary in the mother 
country. Hence one undoubted cause of the pressure exerted on the 
native population, since they and the settlers equally want a consi- 
derable extent of the hest land, the inferior soils or less favourable 
locahties being practically valueless to both alike. As to the value 
of institutions of credit to meet this difficulty, see the Letter of Napo- 
leon III. on Algeria (1866), pp. 42-52. 



532 ENGLAND AND 

wars, seriously affected their titles to land. Had 
the victorious tribe ever acquired a complete title, 
or, having done so, abandoned or lost it? These 
and the like were difficult questions which met our 
colonisation. One such question arose at its very 
outset, bearing fruits, aggravated by neglect and mis- 
management, which stand in a close relation with an 
event of our own day, noticed hereafter — the Tara- 
naki war of 1860-1. 

So far are savage communities from possessing 
a Church, that is, a spiritual but outward organisa- 
tion for worship, instruction, and moral discipline, 
that it has often been asserted they have no religion. 
Wider conceptions and more accurate observation 
have, however, greatly altered this view. Fetishism, 
indeed, as the primitive religion of savage tribes 
is designated, rarely presents an order of priests or 
any system of public worship. Its character is dis- 
persive and individualistic, and its influence hardly 
transcends the family, which in truth furnishes its social 
sphere and limits. Any analysis of this remarkable 
phase of religious belief would be here out of place,* 
but it is not so to point out that missionary teaching, 
and especially that of Protestant missionaries, gener- 
ally speaking, runs directly counter to the funda- 

* Those who desire to pursue this interesting but difficult in- 
quiry may be referred to the first chapter of the " Philosophy of His- 
tory," by Auguste Comte (see the Politique Positive^ torn, iii.), and the 
Considerations siir la Chine, by M. Pierre Laffitte. For some striking 
remarks on the permanent results of primitive or savage communities 
on human civilisation in reference to the domestication of the inferior 
animals, see Marsh's llan and Nature, pp. 39 and 121 ; also the paper 
by Mr. Galton (Report of British Association, 1864, p. 93), " First Steps 
towards the Domestication of Animals." The views of these writers 
tend to prove the great, though unacknowledged, debt which civilised 
owes to savage man. 



THE UNCIVILISED C O:\BIUNITIES. 533 

mental feature of the untutored mind of the Fetishist, 
namely, his radical inaptitude for generalisation and 
abstract ideas. A still more fatal mistake arises 
from an irrational contempt for the social institutions 
^^diich flow from and rest upon the religious concep- 
tions of the savage, and especially his worship for the 
ancestors of his family and tribe. ^ 

Of these mstitutions, the most universal and im- 
portant is that of the Tomb. The efficacy of this as 
a source of patriotism has been especially remarked 
among the Kafir tribes. f Their intense attachment 
to the land of their forefathers was, in earlier times, 
little regarded by the governors, whose arbitrary and 
repeated removals of various tribes contributed to 
the many Cape wars which will be noticed hereafter. 
Another institution, less universal, but videly dif- 
fused through Polynesia, and once prevalent in New 
Zealand, is the Tapu or Taboo, which should be re- 
garded as a rude system of law and government. Of 
fetishistic orgin, its use was partly religious, as, for 
example, to set apart burial-grounds and other sacred 
things, partly civil, to protect property or enforce 
observances of various kinds. Administered by the 
chiefs it does not admit of doubt that the Taboo was 

^' A very interesting and candid account of primitive religion and 
its social institutions will be found in Les Bassoutos (a branch of the 
Zulu-Kafirs living north of Natal), by M. E. Casalis, ancien missionnaire, 
2d ed. 1860. To a reflecting mind it would natm'ally occur, that the 
veneration of the savage for his tribal ancestors affords a valuable germ, 
which, by judicious treatment, might be expanded into something 
wider and higher, and made an instrument for introducing the uncivi- 
lised man into the noble inheritance, intellectual and social, of Western 
Europe. See the " Calendrier Positiviste," or historico-biographic 
Synopsis, in the 4th vol. of the Politique Positive, by Auguste Comte, 
and the remarks thereon by Mr. John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte and 
Positivism, p. 116. 

7 See Casalis, Les Bassoutos^ p. 165. 



534 ENGLAND AND 

often abused, especially in its decline; but the most 
intelligent observers'^ have borne testimony to its 
social efficacy, and have pointed out that, both as 
fairly used and when abused, f it presents many ana- 
logies to our own customs and laws. These two 
institutions — the Tomb and the Taboo — with kin- 
dred ones, have long supplied to savage communities 
a system of government, partly moral, partly poli- 
tical. Though rude and imperfect, they deserve a 
more careful study and greater respect than they 
have hitherto received from European nations, who, 
whether from carelessness or ignorance, have invari- 
ably undermined what they showed neither disposition 
nor capacity to replace. 

The moral characteristics of savages of course 
vary greatly with their condition, pursuits, and cir- 
cumstances. "With much that repels there is gener- 
alty much also that recals the nobler features of our 
common nature. Nevertheless, though we should 
do justice to these last, there is as little truth as 
wisdom in glossmg over the evil and dangerous ten- 

* See Thomson's Story of Neio Zealand^ vol. i. chap. v. ; Short- 
land's Superstitions of the New Zealanders ; Revue des Deux Mondes, 
1864, vol. i., two articles on the Polynesians, by M. Quatrefages ; 
British Quarterly Review^ 1865 (April), p. 404, " Facts from Savage 
Life." A remarkable example of a spontaneous revolt (prior to mis- 
sionary influence) against the Taboo, when used as a means of oppres- 
sion by the chiefs, was furnished by the Sandwich Islands (see Hop- 
kins's Sandwich Islands). The Taboo was greatly used in New Zealand 
as a mode of sanctioning rights of property; and to this day the 
" native reserves" are described in the deeds of sale as " portions of 
land remaining sacred (taboo) to the sellers." Parliamentary Papers, 
presented February 1866, p. 236. 

-j- Compare the strict observance of the Jewish Sabbath — an in- 
stitution which, like so many others of the Mosaic regime, strongly 
savours of primitive fetishism ; and the Game-laws as administered by 
certain " chiefs," better known as English landlords and magistrates. 



THE UNCIVILISED COMMUNITIES. 535 

dencies of untutored and barbarous tribes.* Few 
things have done more harm than a disposition to 
overlook or underrate the immense force of habits 
congenial to undisciplined natures, and handed down 
from generation to generation, among which must be 
placed foremost, indolence, recklessness of human life, 
and a savage independence. The worst examples 
of this mistake and its evil consequences are to be 
found in the history of the dealings of civilised na- 
tions with the best savage races. The Kafir, who 
was set down as an " irreclaimable savage," had pro- 
bably a better chance of ultimate moral and social 
regeneration than the Maori, whose keen apprecia- 
tion of the material benefits of " Christianity and com- 
merce" made him the victim of a proselytism which 
demolished much while replacing little in a satisfac- 
tory manner, and of a policy which avoided the cost 
Avith the responsibility of governing. 

Of all the contrasts between savage and civilised 
communities, perhaps the most universal, enduring, 
and practically important is that presented by their 
internal political relations. Among savages or 
semi- civilised peoples, public life or a government 
hardly exists. In place of a State, or society or- 
ganised as a nation and acknowledging one supreme 
authority and ruling power, we find merely Tribes. 
These tribes are, more or less, related by origin, 
bound together by ties of race, language, and cus- 
tom, and sometimes even acknowledge a certain hier- 
archy or social scale of dignity and influence among 

* An instructive essay on this subject will be found in the Abori- 
gines Eeport, Pari. Papers, 1837, vol. vii. p. 129. Though especially 
directed to the peculiarly barbarous natives of Western Australia, the 
catalogue of bad qualities (cunning, revenge, suspicion, acquisitiveness, 
love of ease, superstition, and vanity) is of very general application. 



536 ENGLAND AND 

themselves and their respective chiefs. Still, as tribes, 
their organisation and existence remain essentially 
distinct, although, as the Kafir wars and still more 
strikingly the "Maori king" movement have shown, 
the preponderance of a neighbouring colony, and a 
sense of the dangers with which its growth threatens 
the aborigines, may arouse a deeper sense of nation- 
ality, and create the desire for some social bond 
under a chief recognised as supreme. Such rare 
efforts, however, only serve, by their general failure 
or partial success, to make more manifest the disin- 
tegrating forces of tribal life ; although, on the other 
hand, they should, both in justice and policy, read 
a valuable lesson to the ruling European power, of 
opportunities thrown away and duties neglected. 

But notwithstanding this absence of a State or 
nation, tribal communities present two features which 
furnish at least the germs of political existence, and, 
if rightly understood and managed, would afford the 
means of further growth. These are, the prevalence 
of Customary Law, and the authority of the Chiefs. 

Customs which are the foundation of native rights 
of property cannot without manifest injustice be dis- 
regarded. Whatever may have formerly been the 
case, a sense of international duty and humanity 
have in more recent times, generally speaking, o])e- 
rated to protect the aborigines against a foixible 
seizure of their land. The tribal rights of the Maoris 
in New Zealand have on the whole been honourably 
respected; the difficulties which have there arisen 
being less the result of any direct aggression than 
of long neglect and imperfect government. In fact, 
as above observed, measures wisely taken and steadily 
pursued for the conversion of tribal into individual 



THE UNCIVILISED C O:\BIUNITIES. 537 

property, would have been as useful to the natives 
as to the colony. For this purpose, however, they 
must have been combined with other measures of 
control and guidance, aiFectmg what may be called 
the criminal jurisprudence of the natives. Nothing 
more clearly requires a ^dgorous, yet wise and for- 
bearmg, treatment than the customs which regulate 
the domestic and social relations of the aborigines, 
and their gradual amelioration under the influence of 
European law and administration of justice. The 
following observations* on this head are important 
and of very general application, though their author 
(Sir George Grey) unhappily did not carry them out 
sufficiently in JSTew Zealand : 

"I would submit, therefore, that it is necessary from the 
moment the aborigines of this country are declared British sub- 
jects, they should, as far as possible, be taught that the British 
laws are to supersede their own, so that any natiye ruler suffer- 
ing under their own customs may have the power of an appeal 
to those of Great Britain; or, to put this in its true light, that 
all authorised persons should in all instances be required to pro- 
tect a native from the violence of his fellows, even though they de 

in the execution of their oiun laics However unjust 

such a proceeding might at first sight appear, I believe that the 
course pointed out by true humanity would be to make them 
from the xqtj commencement amenable to the British laws, loth 
as regards themselves and Europeans; for I hold it to be imagin- 
ing a contradiction to suppose that individuals subject to savage 
and barbarous laws can rise into a state of civilisation, which 
those laws have a manifest tendency to destroy and overturn. . 
. . . . I imagine that this course would be more merciful 
than that at present adopted, viz. to punish them for the viola- 
tion of a law they are ignorant of, tvhen this violation affects a 
European, and yet to allow them to commit this crime as often 
as they like, ivhen it only regards themselves; for this latter course 

* Pari. Papers, 1844, vol. xxxiv. Aborigines in Austrahan colonies, 
pp. 100-4. See also the remark, ib. pp. 104-6, p. 380 and p. 392. 



538 ENGLAND AND 

teaches them, not that certain actions, as murder, are generally 
criminal, but only that they are criminal when exercised towards 
the white population." 

The influence of the Chiefs, though often exces- 
sive and arbitrary, seldom rests on any strong and 
permanent foundation; a necessary consequence of 
the feebleness of public life among savage tribes. 
Hence a disposition in their civilised rulers to hold 
the heads of tribes of small account, and to ignore 
their claims to social distinction and influence. The 
wisest observers and best statesmen* have recom- 
mended a very different policy, — one which should 
make the chiefs the allies and subordinate instru- 
ments of the European authorities. The necessity 
for such a system of transitional government be- 
comes still more evident if we consider the close con- 
nection that subsists between the power of the chiefs 
and the customary law of the tribes. The latter acts 
partly to support, partly to control, the former. But 
the natural tendency of European government, and 
even of mere colonial contacts, f is to break down the 
native customs, and with these the influence of the 
chiefs ; to some extent no doubt their power for evil, 
but also their entire authority, without substituting 
any better control. Thus the overthrow of super- 
stitious or tyrannical customs, unless accompanied by 
well-conceived plans of reorganisation, may, with the 
best intentions, produce anarchy among the natives, J 

* See the evidence of Lieut.-Col. Colebrooke on the tribal self- 
government of natives. Aborigines Report, Pari. Papers, 1837, vol. 
xxxvii. p. 43. 

f See a striking passage confirmative of this view in the recent 
letter of Napoleon III. (pp. 12-14) on Algeria, relative to the Arab 
tribes. 

t " Maori M.ohsimm.edsimsm,'"— Fortnightly Review^ 1st Nov. 1865. 



THE UXCIVILISED COMMUNITIES. 539 

and create difficulties, which commonly bear their 
fruits when least expected. 

In jSTew Zealand, for example, the lawlessness, now 
almost universal in native districts, may be primarily 
traced to the destruction of the Tapu, the main foun- 
dation of the authority of the chiefs, through the 
missionary teaching and colonial contacts,* while no 
adequate system of civilised justice was set up in its 
place. The followmg remarkable and aifecting appeal 
(among many similar proofs) shows at how early a 
period this social anarchy of the Maoris began under 
British rule. It is contained in a letter written in 
1848 to the Governor of JN^ew Zealand, by* a native 
chief (Tamati Ngapora), who was and has always 
continued friendly to Europeans : 

"Friend the Goyernor, — This is my speech to you. Hearken 
to my word, friend. Do not slight my thoughts, because this 
is the thought of many of the chiefs of New Zealand. This is 
the thing that causes confasion at all their yillages, namely, what 
I am about to state to you. Formerly, father the goyernor, 
when we adhered to our native customs, we had light on this 
subject, but now this land is mixed with up with the customs of 
Europeans, new thoughts or habits have been imbibed, and dark- 
ness has ensued in consequence. I wish to make known my 
thoughts to you in this matter, that you may hear them, and 
give some light on my sentiments. The slaves of my village will 
not obey me ; when I ask them to work, they will not regard me ; 
the result of this conduct is theft and adultery. I cannot deter- 
mine in these matters. In your estimation, perhaps, these are 
trifles, but to me they are great things, because they affect the 
welfare of the chiefs. Formerly brave people were considered in 
the light of chiefs, but now they are considered as nothing. You 
Europeans have effected this change. It is for you, the prop of 
this people, to lay down certain laws to meet these cases." 

The extract next given is taken from a very in- 

* Gorst's Maori King^ and Pari. Papers, 1849, vol. xxxv. p. 18. 



540 ENGLAND AND 

teresting report* on tlie Zulu-Kafir population of Natal. 
The state of things described in the concluding j)ara- 
graph is, however, highly deserving of attention, inas- 
much as the influences there noticed as now affecting 
the power of the chiefs, largely operated at former 
epochs to cause discontent in British Kafraria, and 
very nearly produced a dangerous outbreak in 1857 :f 

" The Chiefs of tribes originally possessed absolute power over 
the lives and property of their subjects, and enjoyed all the im- 
munities and privileges of such a position. The only limit to 
the exercise of this power was the necessity for conciliating public 
opinion, more or less in proportion to the resources for coercion 
they might, possess in a standing army. "When this engine did 
not exist, the most efficient instrument was, accusations of witch- 
craft. These, skilfully managed, were always sufficiently potent 
to overthrow the most powerful subject and ruin the most 
wealthy family. As a political engine, it was stronger and safer 
than an army, because it secured the concurrence of the people, 
and in most cases was made to appear to be a reluctant concession 
to them by the chief, when in point of fact he was the originator 
of the persecution himself. Formerly, desertion from one chief 
to another was looked upon as a description of treason, because 
it weakened and thereby endangered the abandoned tribe. In 
the colony of Natal, however, these things are changed. All the 
supreme powers are transferred to the safe-keeping of the head 
of the government. Political accusations of witchcraft have long 
ceased to be made, because there can now be no object in making 
them. The chiefs have no longer the right of assembling their 
tribes in arms, except by direction of the supreme chief (the Lieu- 
tenant-Governor of the colony). The removal of persons from one 
tribe to another, or one locality to another, is now a matter under 
the direct supervision of the magistrate, acting upon instructions 
from the seat of government, and the chiefs look upon them- 
selves as the lieutenants of the supreme chief, for the execution 
of his orders, and for the management of their respective tribes 

* Pari. Papers, 1864. Eeports on Colonial Possessions (Natal). 
Replies by the Secretary for l^ative Affairs to questions of the Lieut. - 
Governor, p. 48. 

t See the Quarterly Eevieiu, 1860, vol. cviii. " South Africa." 



THE UNCIVILISED COMMUNITIES. 541 

in accordance therewith. I have already said, that the people 
concur in this arrangement. It is so much gained to them, 
because the many changes forced upon them by their contact 
with civilisation require a higher guidance than their Chiefs can 
give; but it v/ould be a mistake to suppose that the sentiment 
of regard and veneration for the persons and families of their 
Chiefs has been destroyed. They are a practical clever people, 
and see the necessity for alterations, such as have taken place, 
but they are loyal also and still venerate the ancient reigning 
families. It is tliey who have really lost as much as their people 
have gained by the new state of things. They have teen stripjped 
of their revenue as icell as of their rank and ]JOiver; and although 
they continue to discharge important duties for Government, and are 
indisiJensaliJe to the good government of their triles, they have hitherto 
(Oct. 1863) received no comioensation for their losses or services." 

The foreo'oino' brief revieAV of some leadino: cha- 
racteristics of savage and semi- civilised communities 
may serve for the purpose of this essay, bearing of 
course in mind their great diversity in point of de- 
ofree. Thus we rise from the scattered and inferior 
inhabitants of Australia to the intelligent and com- 
merce-loving, though feebly organised, Maoris, and 
the compact hierarchy of the Kafir tribes. 

Let us next turn to the nations of Western Eu- 
rope, considering the relations they form with, and 
the influences they exert upon such backward popula- 
tions. Two important and difficult problems present 
themselves at the outset; the preservation of the na- 
tive races, and the political and territorial relations 
of the tribes with the European state. 

Slavery vdth all its evils was, at an early period 
of the world's history, an amelioration in savage war- 
fare, the conqueror granting to the captive his life 
in exchange for his services. It is therefore strange 
that in the nineteenth century a theory should be 
maintained, which, if it could be reduced to practice, 



542 ENGLAND AND 

would restore the primitive barbarism, substituting 
for slavery extermination. Cupidity and reckless- 
ness are sanctioned, and the best teachings of reli- 
gion and philosophy set aside, by a view which, while 
it tacitly admits the moral impossibility of enslaving 
native populations, asserts that the progress of the 
human race involves the extinction of its least 
favoured portions.* On the other hand, within the 
present generation a much better feeling has sprung 
up in Europe, and the country which made such 
efforts and sacrifices to extinguish slavery can never 
fall back on extermination. 

It is clear that the preservation of aboriginal races 
from the bad effects incident to their own defective 
habits and institutions, and unregulated contacts 
with Europeans, raises a question surrounded mth 
no ordinary difficulties. Theoretically considered, 
the causes which thus tend to produce extinction are 
but partially understood. Practically, the extreme 
imperfection of our social arrangements obstructs 
the steady application even of admitted remedies. f 
It appears to me that the solution of the problem 
depends less on the future accumulation of special 
observations, however useful these may be, than on 
the full comprehension and the steady application of 
a few social principles, sufficiently elementary, yet too 

* This, with reference to races or communities, is exactly the view 
on which barbarous tribes justify — as even some nations of classic 
antiquity did — the extinction of individual life, as in the case of female 
infants, children physically defective, and the aged. It is hardly 
necessary to say that the smallest advance in humanity and real 
civilisation sufficed to reject such a view as being equally shallow 
and barbarous. 

f See the remarks on the decline of native population, Edinhurgh 
Review^ April 1850, "Polynesia and New Zealand;" and Quarterly 
Review, 1859, vol. cvi. " The Islands of the Pacific." 



THE UNCIVILISED COMMUNITIES. 54^ 

little regarded. The preservation of savage commu- 
nities, I believe, mainly depends on their gradual ele- 
vation in the social scale, and their direct participation 
in the moral and intellectual results of Western civi- 
lisation. One of the most, perhaps the most, serious 
obstacle to the attainment of this end arises from our 
prevailing disposition to an exaggerated individualism, 
overlooking the paramount importance of the family 
as the fundamental unit of society. The weak poli- 
tical ties of savage communities give a peculiar sig- 
nificance to their domestic life; yet both colonial 
governments and missionaries, generally speaking, 
overlook this fact, and concentrate their attention on 
the individual. Public works, hospitals, and native, 
villages are excellent in their way; yet progress in 
these respects may coexist with entire barbarism of 
domestic life, both in its material and moral aspects. 

Thus, for example, in New Zealand, it was re- 
ported* in 1852 that the natives of the Northern 
Island were indeed " acquiring property, but their 
houses and mode of living had remained nearly the 
same for the last ten years." So likewise an able and 
humane physician, f in a valuable report (made and 
first published in 1856), attributes the rapid decay 
of the Maori race (from about 100,000, their number 
at the end of the 18th century, to 56,000) mainly to 
their deficiencies in three matters, themselves the 
material foundation of all domestic economy — food, 
clothino^, and lodo^ins;. So also of the moral condi- 
tions. At the Cape, it is found that respectable 
English girls prefer to marry Mohammedan Malays 
rather than Christian Hottentots ; a fact which may be 

* Parliamentary Papers, 1852, vol. xxxv. No. 1475, p. 110. 

■f Dr. Thomson. See his Story of Neio Zealand, vol. ii. p. 288. 



544 ENGLAND AND 

accounted for when we learn that "the missionarized 
Hottentots are not, it is said, thought well of, being 
even tipsier than the rest."* In New Zealand we 
are startled to learn that, after half-a-century of 
missionary labours, the crime of infanticide, though 
diminished, is thought to be still prevalent ;f and 
that '' chastity before marriage is an unknown virtue 
among the Maori women/'J It is only just to add 
that no efforts, however well directed, can eradicate 
these moral evils unless systematically supported by 
the Colonial Government to an extent seldom thought 
of and never carried out. In these respects, and in 
truth generally, the problem presented by savage and 
semi-civilised communities is essentially the same as 
that which reo;ards the lowest and most neo^lected 
classes of European society; namely, their gradual 
participation in the best results — physical, intellec- 
tual, and moral — of Western civilisation. The main 
sources of its solution are likewise identical, consist- 
ing in the gradual realisation of a true domestic life 
in its three grand essentials of a home, employment, 
and education. 

The political and territorial relations between sa- 
vages and the civilised nations of Western Europe 
have engaged attention from the beginning of the 
sixteenth century. By far the most important class 

* Vacation Tourists^ 1862-3 ; Lady Duff G-ordon, Letters from the 
Cape^ p. 205. The picture also wliich this writer gives of the dissen- 
sions of Protestant denominations with respect to the natives is not 
edifying. Unfortunately it has its counterpart in the history of all 
missionary enterprises which I have read, where rival churches or sects 
come into competition with each other, whether in Europe, Asia, Africa, 
America, or Oceania. 

f Thomson, Story of New Zealand^Yol. ii. pp. 286-7. ] 
% Fraser's Magazine, October 1865, "Pai Marke," p. 432. 



THE UNCIVILISED COmiUNITIES. 545 

of cases were those wliich involved both political and 
territorial relations as the result, not of mere com- 
mercial contacts, but of colonisation. Theoretically as 
well as practically, two considerations lay at the bot- 
tom of all discussions, and mainly decided the course 
pursued: first, the superiority, real or assumed, of 
European nations in religion, science, and the arts of 
war and peace ; secondly, the low industrial and so- 
cial condition of the aborigines, and especially their 
want of any well-organised public existence or state. 

Some writers, Yattel* for example, proceed on 
an assumed natural and universal obligation to till 
the ground ; whence is deduced the right of civilised 
men to take possession, and, if necessary, even forcible 
possession, of the ''waste and unoccupied territory 
of savage tribes;" the purchase of native land by 
the Puritan settlers and William Pemi being simply 
praised as a proof of their moderation. 

This view, however, has not been universally 
adopted by jurists; and the law of England, in par- 
ticular, followed by the United States, sanctions a 
very different doctrine. The principle it lays down 
is as follows :f the colonising state, by virtue of prior 
discovery and the ascendency of civilised over savage 
man, on the one hand, claims a paramount dominion 
over the land, with a right of preemption, on the 
other, admits the natives' right of occupancy, or their 
lawful possession of territory inhabited or claimed by 
them, though not in their actual occupation or use. 
It also maintains the claim of the aborigines to pro- 
tection. The protection thus extended may, how- 

^ Laio of Nations, by Chitty, 1834, pp. 35, 100. 

t See Kent's Commentaries on American Law, 7tli edition, vol. iii. 
pp. 460-86. See also the important judgment in the Queen v. Symonds, 
New Zealand Parhamentary Papers, 1860, vol. xlvii. No. 492, p. 417. 

NN 



546 ENGLAND AND 

ever, take two shapes, according as the natives are 
regarded as semi-dependent allies or are treated as 
subjects, a condition which may be either imposed by 
the European state or conceded by the natives. The 
point which has chiefly interested both jurists and 
statesmen is the ' right of preemption' just mentioned. 
This involves two thino;s. It secures to the colonisino; 
state, as against other European nations, the mono- 
poly of the land-purchase. It also enables that state, 
as against its own subjects, to acquire large tracts of 
land at a nominal price, with the faculty of granting 
or selling in parcels. The right so claimed must have 
been at all times evidently of paramount importance. 
Its importance, however, has been greatly enhanced 
in reference to the " systematic colonisation"* of 
modern times ; by which the accumulation of exorbi- 
tant quantities of land in a few hands is prevented, and 
the price paid by the settler is laid out upon surveys, 
roads, and other improvements indispensable for the 
prosperity of the colony, and advantageous to the 
purchasing colonist. In addition to the rights con- 
ceded to the savage occupants by the foregoing doc- 
trine of International Law, special Treaties have fre- 
quently been entered into, purporting to secure the 
natives more clearly in their rights of occupancy, or 
to recognise their independent sovereignty, or gua- 
ranteeing to them the protection of the colonising 
state, sometimes as semi-dependent allies, at other 
times even as subjects. 

Unfortunately the practical results have not cor- 
responded with the apparent justice of the general 
principle, or the advantages promised by the special 
treaty. Their failure to secure the well-being or 

* Merivale's Colonisation and the Colonies^ and Mill's Political Economy. 



THE UNCIVILISED COMMUNITIES. 547 

even existence of the aborigines is known; and the 
reasons for this demand our earnest attention. One, 
and indeed the principal, reason seems to be the in- 
sufficiency of any admission of mere rights^ unaccom- 
panied by a clear and practical recognition of duties^ 
as due from the powerful and progressive European 
state to the backward and feeble tribes. The more 
thoughtful and better-disposed class of writers on this 
difficult subject manifestly tend in this direction,* 
while the public are increasingly disposed to advo- 
cate a just and generous morality which enforces the 
duty of the strong to protect and aid the weak. In 
fact, the ordinary rules of fair and equal dealing be- 
tween European nations, as embodied, more or less, 
in what is styled International Law, though essential, 
are quite insufficient to regulate our dealings with 
savage and semi-civilised tribes. Having regard also 
to their ignorance of our conventional political ideas 
and language, and imperfect social organisation, there 
is strong reason for believing that formal Treaties are 
rather a danger than a protection or advantage to 
such communities. f The treaty which laid the foun- 
dation of our systematic colonisation in New Zealand 
(that of Waitangi, hereafter noticed) seems to be very 

* See Merivale's Colonisation and the Colonies, pp. 487-564. — " The^ 
most important object of a regenerated polity will be the substitution 
of duties for rights ; thus subordinating personal to social considera- 
tions. The adoption of this principle is the one way of realising the 
grand idea of the Middle Ages, the subordination of Politics to Morals. 
Its solution consists in regarding our political and social action as the 
service of humanity." A General Vieio of Positivism (translated from 
the French of Auguste Comte by J. H. Bridges, M.B.), pp. 383-4. 

-j- Great Britain has taken this view in several more recent cases of 
colonisation {e.g. Natal and Vancouver's Island), avoiding all treaties 
except as to border tribes ; and even here not relying on such gua- 
rantees, but looking mainly to wise precautions and an eflQcient system 
of political agency and police. 



548 ENGLAND AND 

much iu point, since the Maoris did not understand 
it in the way we did ; and the British interpretation, 
as embodied in imperial and colonial practice, treated 
our alleged rights as a reality, but made a negation 
of our self-imposed and solemnly-promised duties. 

Two leading considerations, therefore, I believe, 
require to be borne in mind as regards the dealings 
of European nations with savage tribes. First, there 
is the absolute necessity for special precautions, in 
order to avert or mitigate disputes, to enforce justice 
(in reference both to the natives and the settlers), and 
to impart gradually the benefits of civilisation to the 
subordinate community. Secondly, inasmuch as the 
tribes look much more to acts than laws, no govern- 
ment can succeed which does not secure their confi- 
dence and respect by combining personal influence 
with a steady adherence to a system at once humane, 
far-seeing, and courageous. 

European influence over savage tribes springs from 
three sources, Religion, Industry, and Polity, Notwith- 
standing some incidental benefits, the relations thus 
established have done much harm, without, it would 
seem, as yet, producing any adequate compensation. 

The missionary efforts of Western Europe"^* dur- 
ino: the last three centuries would merit a lousier 
examination than is here possible. Some reference 
to them seems to be necessary, since, as has been 
truly observed, " the character of a barbarous people 
cannot be changed by force of arms, nor by any 
political settlem^ent of their affairs. "f For good, 

^ A succinct sketcli of Protestant Missions will be found in the 
North British Review, No. 80 (1864). 

f Sir P. Maitland, Grovernor of Cape of Good Hope, Pari. Papers, 
1847-8, vol. xliii. p. 23. 



THE UNCIVILISED COmiUNlTIES. 549 

therefore, or for e\T.l, the influence of missionaries 
is constantly and justly referred to by statesmen as 
an important element in the policy of civilised to- 
wards savage communities. These contacts have, 
no doubt, manifested much that is noble and dis- 
interested in the European, and supplied valuable 
information as to the savage; but with serious draw- 
backs as regards actual results. The semi- civilisa- 
tion of natives and abolition of sanguinary customs, 
which often form the first victory of missionary 
efforts, pave the way for that irregular and merely 
commercial intercourse with Europeans which has 
invariably introduced so much of evil among savage 
tribes. Impartial thinkers* tend to the conclusion 
that missions have not counteracted the mischiefs 
thus resulting, or effected any good comparable to 
the exertions made. As this comparative failure 
deeply affects the social condition of the aborigines, 
it may be desirable to point out briefly some of its 
leadhig causes. 

The teaching of the missionary to savages has an 
importance much above that of the same influence 
at home. Among European nations misconceptions 
affecting social existence and the moral nature are 
counteracted in many ways, especially by the growth 
of sounder viev^s and the exigencies of practical 
life ; but with the savage it is quite otherwise, since 
there the foundation has to be laid. In modern life 
we practically learn — and that often in spite of ad- 
verse dogmas — to regard industry as a blessing, to 
respect woman, and to believe in social and disinter- 

'-" See Merivale's Colonisation and the Colonies^ p. 560 ; Quarterly 
i^erici'.;, December 1863, p. 81, the "Missions of Polynesia, ;" and the 
article " Missions" in the Encyclojjcedia Britannica, 8th ed. 



550 ENGLAND AND 

ested affections. But among savages, where love of 
ease predominates, and the condition of the female 
sex is always low, their state can hardly be improved 
by being taught to regard labour as a divinely-in- 
flicted 23unishment, and woman as the source of evil. 
Agam, even the imperfect sociability of barbarous 
tribes revolts against lessons of the absolute wicked- 
ness of human nature.* 

But the mistaken social attitude of missionaries 
is a still deeper source of mischief and failure. Ab- 
sorbed in doctrinal teaching, and spurred on by the 
desire to show numerous converts,! they too often 
neglect the practical basis of life, not only as to 
material well-being, but as to the personal virtues 
most essential to domestic well-being and happmess. 
No doubt allowance must be largely made for diffi- 
culties of situation and deficiencies of resources ; but 
even these are much aggravated by the mistaken 
and narrow views of society and public life prevalent 
among missionaries. They adopt a semi-theocratic 
type, seeking to govern through a system of tutelage 
and an exaggerated isolation. The Jesuit missions 
of Paraguay! furnish a remarkable example; not, 
however, wholly unlike the history of the Protestant 
missions in the Sandwich Islands. § But this bad 
system produces its worst effects in Colonies, where 
such a regime is, generally speaking, quite out of 
place. There the missionary too often regards the 
savaofe almost as a saint, and the colonist as a con- 

^* See Mrs. Ward's Five Years in Kafir Land^ vol. i. p. 115. 

f See Mrs. Smyth's Ten Months in the Fiji Islands^ p. 173. 

J See Merivale's Colonisation and the Colonies^ p. 285, as to these 
and the causes of their decline. 

§ See Manley Hopkins, The Sandwich Islands ; and the review of 
West's Friendly Islands in the Athenceum of 10th February 1866. 



THE UNCIVILISED COMMUNITIES. 551 

^dct ; thus inevitably sowing the seeds of discord, and 
depriving himself and his 'protege of the sympathy 
and assistance so needful for his work. The results 
of this mistaken system are nearly the same every 
where, and nowhere have they been more clearly or 
painfully revealed than in New Zealand. It Jbegins 
by underminmg native ideas and habits, without 
giving any adequate substitute; its second phase 
develops an exaggerated antagonism between native 
and European interests, alienating the colonists ; and 
finally, as the aborigines emerge from the savage 
state, they throw off their allegiance to the mission- 
aries.* 

In the foregoing observations it is not intended 
to depreciate such real advantages as Christian teach- 
ing and missionary devoteclness can produce among 
savage tribes; only to place these spiritual guides 
in their true light as simple allies of the political 
power, whose efforts, if wisely directed and suffi- 
ciently controlled, may prove useful. f A like re- 
mark applies with still greater force to the influ- 
ences of commerce. It is certainly surprismg that 

* As to conversions see Thomson, History of New Zealand^ vol. i. 
pp. 305 et seqq. ; Hursthouse, New Zealand, pp. 115-7; " Pai Marire," 
Frazer's Magazine, October 1865 ; " Maori Mohammedanism," Fort- 
oiightly Revieiv, I^oy. 1, 1865; and the recent Report of the Church 
Missionary Society. As to relations with colonists see the resolution 
of the Church Missionary Society, Report, Select Committee House of 
Lords on IS^ew Zealand, Pari. Papers, 1837-8, vol. xxi. p. 243. As to 
diminished influence of missionaries see Gorst, Maori King, p.- 5. 

f I wish to guard myself from being supposed to assert any abso- 
lute and unvarying proposition concerning the two kinds of govern- 
ment, spiritual and temporal, which always have affected and always 
must affect the constitution and movement of society. The view here 
submitted concerns the present conditions and relations of the above 
two powers, which are, I believe, eminently transitional. The whole 
subject of missionary teaching and influence can be adequately dealt 



552 ENGLAND AND 

statesmen* should place such reliance, as is often 
expressed, on the commercial intercourse of savage 
with civilised men; having regard to the influence 
exercised by such dealings on much stronger com- 
munities, and the proved difficulties of preventing 
the sale of spirits and fire-arms. These exaggerated 
impressions are not simply illusory. They are also 
mischievous, since they blind to the necessity for 
measures reaching far deeper, and of much slower 
growth. 

Of such commercial dealings the land itself is 
often the most important subject between natives 
and colonists; and being to the former, not only 
their chief wealth, but the essential condition of their 
existence, the one-sided view just mentioned here 
produces its worst effects. To appreciate the mag- 
nitude of the danger, it is necessary to bear in 
mind, first, the "right of preemption" claimed, as 
before mentioned, from savage tribes by the colonising 
state; and next, its bearing on the principle and 
practice of "systematic colonisation." The European 
nation first asserts the right (frequently confirmed 
by treaty) to become the exclusive purchaser of 
native land, and that at a price necessarily very 
trifling, and which, moreover, does not vary with 
competition or increase mth time. The Colonial 
Government thus gradually acquires large tracts, 



•with, only by considering it in reference to the movement which, 
during the last five centuries, has tended, with increasing force, at 
once to dissolve the ancient social bases, spiritual and temporal, and 
to reconstitute these in the interests of a normal and regenerated so- 
ciety, commencing in Western Europe, and thence destined to extend 
gradually throughout the world. 

* See a remarkable example of this, Pari. Papers, 1852, vol, xxxiii. 
No. 1428, p. 259, Kafir tribes. 



THE UXCIVILISED COMMUNITIES. 553 

and resells tliem, according to the more modern 
practice, to the settlers, who pay an advanced price, 
in consideration of surveys, roads, and other per- 
manent improvements, as well as the general advan- 
tages of government. 

This plan has been successfully carried out in our 
Australasian colonies, and among these in ISTew Zea- 
land, from the foundation of that colony in 18-4:0. 
There the land was pm^chased from the natives by 
the Crown under its preemptive right, expressly sanc- 
tioned by the treaty of Waitangi, at merely nommal 
prices, varying from a few pence to Is. Qd. per acre, 
and resold to the colonists for IO5. per acre for agri- 
cultural purposes, and sometimes for as much as 10^. 
per acre in town lots. The revenue brought into the 
Colonial Treasury by selling and leasing Crown lands 
has always been very large. 606,830/.* were realised 
from this source in 1862, forming at that time more 
than one-half of the entire annual revenue. Had, then, 
the natives any claim to have at least a portion of 
this large territorial income directly applied towards 
their material and social amelioration? The respon- 
sible ministers of the Colonial House of Kepresenta- 
tives said they had none. " N^o principle oijustice^^^ 
it was affirmed by the Colonial Treasurer,! "requires 
that the natives shall share in the increased value 
given to the land by the industry and capital of 

* Martin, The Statesmaii's Yecrr-looh, 1866, p. 676 ; and see Hurst- 
house, Neio Zealand^ p. 177. 

t Pari. Papers, 1861, vol. xU. p. 451 ; ib. 1860, vol. xlvii. No. 492, 
pp. 20-34. It is right to state that these gentlemen admitted the 
duty of protecting and improving the natives, as well as the neces- 
sity for doing so; but the tendency of their Memorandum was to 
cut down the financial claim as far as could be done, and thus 
practically to defeat their avowed policy. The doctrine here quoted 
and objected to was, I think, wholly inconsistent with the plan 



554 ENGLAND AND 

Europeans; tliough," he adds, "it would be politic 
to give them a share by way of bonus." This view 
appears to me quite unsustainable, and in every way 
dangerous. It is true, indeed, that the settler pays 
with a view to benefiting by an expenditure impossible 
unless a land-fund were thus created. These bene- 
fits, however, accrue not simply to the mdividual 
colonist, but to him through the Colony, of which the 
natives may, and, in the case of ]^ew Zealand by 
treaty, do form a part. Again, the natives, by peace- 
ably yielding to the Government the claim for pre- 
emption, debar themselves from that advance in 
price which all other landowners gain — often, be it 
observed, without any exertion of their own — by the 
extension and progressive wealth of their neighbours. 
No stronger proof of this can be given than the fact 
that the New-Zealand loan of 500,000Z. was expressly 
asked for in 1857, on the ground that unless the na- 
tive land could soon be bought up, the growing sense 
which the natives were acquiring of the value of their 



proposed by the same ministers for settling the land - question in 
New Zealand. This plan, in many respects undoubtedly an admir- 
able one, contemplated the gradual individualisation of tribal pro- 
perty, with a view to enabling the natives and colonists to treat 
directly for the sale of the land. But if the natives were thus to 
be enabled to get the best market-price for their land, it is not easy 
to see why, under the preemptive system, the Government were justi- 
fied in appropriating the entire of the advanced price to the exclusive 
benefit of European purchasers. I believe that besides the direct in- 
jurious effect of this doctrine in limiting the resources applicable to 
native purposes, it had a further indirect but very mischievous conse- 
quence. It tended greatly to encourage the notion maintained by the 
responsible Ministers that the control of the Maoris should be handed 
over absolutely to the Colonial Assembly and a shifting ministry, in- 
stead of being confided to a mixed body representing both European 
and native interests, and offering sufficient guarantees as to stability 
and otherwise. 



THE UNCIVILISED COMIVfUNITIES. 555 

unsold territory would oblige tlie Colonial Govern- 
ment to pay a much higher price.* 

Apart, therefore, from all special treaty - obliga- 
tions, and looking only to the broad facts of such 
cases, the mere commercial theory, which would 
compensate the natives by a nominal price and the 
indirect benefits of colonial contacts — a market for 
produce or labour and the acquisition of European 
manufactures — is quite inadequate. Nothing can 
ever really compensate savage tribes for their an- 
cient territorial possessions but the direct benefits 
resulting from a liberal expenditure for their pro- 
tection, guidance, and improvement. Expediency 
alone would suggest this view; but its consistent 
and persevering application can only be guaranteed 
by sounder conceptions and a higher standard of 
European and National duty. 

Another and most important subject of commer- 
cial intercourse between colonists and natives is the 
labour of the latter ; and there is no point which — 
even excluding the pecuhar and disturbing influences 
of slavery followed by emancipation — creates greater 
difficulties,! or more completely exposes the equal 
hoUowness of unthinking philanthropy and mere 

* Parliamentary Papers, 1857, sec. 2, vol. ix. ; Select Committee of 
the House of Commons on New-Zealand Loan. It should be stated 
that the wisest friends of the Maoris advocated the policy of facilita- 
ting the extinction of tribal rights, and approved of this loan on that 
ground. But they only did so on the supposition that, in exchange for 
their superfluous land, the natives were to be gradually made direct 
participants in the benefits of civilisation and good government. 

f Compare the remarks in Wilmot's Cape of Good Hope^ p. 71 ; 
Dr. Mann's Netted^ p. 19 ; Algar's Natcd^ p. 42 ; and Pari. Papers 
(Natal), 1859, sess. 2, vol. xxi. No. 2567, p. 195, as to the Kafir tribes. 
The Maoris have the same defects, though in a much less degree ; see 
Thomson's New Zealand^ vol. ii. p. 299 ; and Gorst's Maori King. 



556 ENGLAND AND 

mercantilism. On the other hand, among the most 
encouraging proofs of improved humanity and wiser 
statesmanship may be mentioned the comparatively 
recent efforts made to facilitate and encourage the 
employment of native labour, on just terms, both in 
public and private works; efforts of which the success 
is not doubtful, though too frequently compromised 
or impaired by the impatience of Colonists and our 
deficient political arrangements. 

The political relations of Western Europe with 
savage and semi- civilised communities have, up to a 
very recent period, been characterised by oppression, 
and even, when least reprehensible, by feebleness and 
neglect. These have bequeathed to us the worst 
results, aggravating in many cases the inherent diffi- 
culties of such relations. But, more than this, our 
improved sentiments and greater insight have, as 
yet, only modified the evil without transforming the 
system. The following brief remarks are directed 
towards the present transitional government of back- 
ward communities by civilised and progressive na- 
tions. Animated by a better spirit, and improving, 
though still most defective, Government at least aims 
at reversing the older policy, by substituting for 
oppression protection; for vacillating weakness wise 
guidance ; and for long and shameful neglect a gra- 
dual incorporation.* 

Direct aggression, ■ — the forcible or fraudulent 

* See and compare the remarks of Mr. Merivale, Colonisation and 
the Colonies^ Lectures 18 and 19. The threefold classification here 
proposed seems to me preferable to the twofold division into protection 
and civilisation. The latter term is, I think, somewhat vague, and 
does not sufficiently point to that element of guidance and control 
which, every where an essential of government, is more than com- 
monly necessary in reference to savage or semi- civilised communities. 



THE UNCIVILISED COMIMUNITIES. 557 

seizure of person, goods, or land, — is no longer sanc- 
tioned and seldom knowingly permitted by the ruling 
power.* Neither do I believe that, as a body, the 
colonists,! more especially that better class who, 
during the last quarter of a century, have furnished 
a large proportion of the emigrants from Europe, in- 
tentionally pursue an unjust policy or advocate harsh 
measures towards the natives. Nay more, many lay 
settlers desire, some of them, and those not the least 
influential, earnestly endeavour to protect, to improve, 
and, with humane wisdom, to guide and control the 
native. On the other hand, our relations with abori- 
gines, whether purely commercial or territorial, not 
merely present many temptations, but give rise to 
peculiar difficulties, which are only partially compen- 
sated and very imperfectly remedied by European or 
Colonial influences. Colonisation, more especially, in- 
directly causes to native populations mischiefs, slowly 
engendered indeed, and long unnoticed, but inevit- 
able and fatal, unless their sources be steadily re- 
moved by direct and prolonged efforts on the part 
of the colonising European state and the governing 
powers of the colony. 

* Where such cases occur, they usually result from the indiscreet 
zeal of subordinate officials ; and this, it may be feared, is not uncom- 
mon. See the remarks of the Emperor Napoleon III. in his recent 
Lettre sur la Politique de la France en Algerie, p. 17. 

-j- It should be remembered that the motto, ccelum non animiim mutant, 
is not applicable in an absolute sense to colonists, however superior by 
nature and education. The position of the struggling settler is not 
favourable to the expansion of generous sentiments of social sym- 
pathy and high notions of public duty. Moreover, there must always 
be a considerable mixture of ranks ; and it is well known that the 
more educated and higher-toned immigrants do not possess the same 
relative importance or influence in a colony as they would do in the 
mother country. 



558 ENGLAND AND 

Thus the intercourse with Europeans is invariably 
followed by temptations to buy ardent spirits and 
fire-arms, and often introduces diseases before un- 
known. Such contacts also, in various other ways, 
spontaneously tend to break up the native ideas and 
social system,* which, imperfect though it be, has at 
least maintained some degree of order, and permitted 
the increase of the aborigines. Looking at these evils 
and their sources, the most obvious mode of protect- 
ing natives has seemed that of isolating them. Ex- 
perience, however, has shown this expedient to be 
illusory and dangerous ; at all events, when taken by 
itself and regarded as a complete and final measure. f 
The natives left to themselves remain stationary, and, 
in any case, do not grow with sufficient rapidity to 
enable them to meet the difficulties of an intercourse 
which the extension of the colony, and increasing 
numbers of the colonists, must sooner or later force 
upon them. A complete fusion, it has been justly re- 
marked, J between populations, not only differing in 
race but belonging to widely difi'erent social stages 
must always be difficult, and is sometimes impossible. 
But if the right method be taken, it is not imprac- 

* See the remarks, Lettre sur la Politique de la France en Algeriey 
by the Emperor Napoleon III. pp. 12-15. 

f See the judicious remarks on this topic of Mr. Merivale, Coloni- 
sation and the Colonies^ p. 510. As part of this system of isolation^ an 
official staff of Protectors so called was created for the special benefit 
of the natives. The plan, however, failed to secure the end proposed, 
in great part because it either ignored or very inadequately provided 
for the relations of the natives with the colonists. It has therefore 
been entirely abandoned in British settlements, and replaced with far 
superior efficacy, when the substitute has been properly carried out, by 
Resident Magistrates and Armed Police. 

% Revue des Deux Mojides, 1863, vol. i., " La Colonisation moderne,"" 
p. 912. 



THE UNCIVILISED COBIUNITIES. 559 

ticable sufficiently to incorporate the lower with the 
higher community. By incorporation I mean that 
process which gradually extends to all, according to 
the measure of their capacity, the benefits of edu- 
cation, — moral, intellectual, and practical; of social 
progress ; and of good government. 

Here, in fact, lies a principal cause of our failures 
to benefit and preserve the native populations — the 
absence of measures, early taken and steadily pur- 
sued, with a view to their gradual incorporation in 
the community of European settlers. Even our most 
praiseworthy efforts are superficially conceived and 
very incomplete. For example, take the institution 
of Native Yillao'es or Keserves, arrano;ed so as to be 
distinct from colonial territory, and yet sufficiently 
near to facilitate the employment of aboriginal labour 
and such kinds of desirable intercourse. The foun- 
dation is good; but the superstructure is left un- 
finished, is seldom even begun. Native communi- 
ties are invariably deficient in the most necessary 
elements of ci^^lised society, — individualisation of 
property, the administration of justice, and an effi- 
cient police. Yet the creation of these is either 
neglected, or, at best, attempted feebly, and with 
very inadequate means. In British Kafraria and 
K^atal, indeed, some effort has been made to supply 
these g-reat deficiencies, thouo:h I fear not on a scale 
adequate to the necessity, or with sufficient appre- 
hension of the difficulty and danger of the under- 
taking (see before, p. 541). But in New Zealand 
no efficient attempt has been made from the founda- 
tion of the colony to the present day, even as regards 
natives located on reserves — which, though consi- 
dered as British territory, are left subject to tribal 



560 ENGLAND AND 

rights, — and much less as regards the great mass of 
the aborigines living on native territory.^ 

The superficial view and neglect here referred 
to are closely connected with the want of a systema- 
tic guidance and — so to speak — providence on the 
part of the ruling European Power, including under 
that term a control, kindly, forbearing, and judicious, 
yet decided and unwavering. Such control, essen- 
tial in every society, is a fundamental condition of 
the just and successful government of savage tribes. 
It becomes, if possible, still more needful, as these, 
through missionary and colonial contacts, are spon- 
taneously brought into a semi-civilised stage ; a stage 
in their social movement the most difficult and dan- 
gerous of all, since it oscillates between an imper- 
fect but long-established order, and disguised yet real 
anarchy. The remarks already made with special 
reference to the Cape of Good Hope and New 
Zealand illustrate this fact, and also show why it 
is that the indirect benefits of commercial dealings 
and colonial contacts, or even praiseworthy, though 
too generally ill-directed, missionary efforts, never 
can supply the want of Government, in its threefold 
function of protection, guidance, and incorporation. 
The first and third offices have been in some mea- 
siu'e understood and aimed at; but our ideas and 
practice are much more defective as regards the 
necessity for guidance, and the conditions, financial 
and other, for guiding native populations. These last 
shortcomings are, I beheve, the principal reason why 
so little has been as yet done to protect and incor- 

^' See the passage already quoted, p. 528, as to the non-perform- 
ance even of our contracts of sale- to give crown-grants to natives ; and 
see the Map of New Zealand below. 



THE UNCIVILISED CO:^mUNITIES. 561 

porate native populations. Some further illustra- 
tions, taken from the history of the same two colo- 
nies, will not, therefore, it is thought, be superfluous. 
They relate to two points of the greatest moment: 
first, the want of any systematic principles of govern- 
ment; and secondly, to a characteristic feature of 
this state of non-government, and one of peculiar 
importance — namely, the want of a proper agency, 
intermediate between the colonial governor and the 
chiefs. 

Writing just before the outbreak of the great 
Kafir war of 1835, the Governor (Sir Benjamin 
D'Urban) thus stated his conviction:* 

" It was sufficiently obyious that a complete and effectual re- 
formation of a system of proceeding with the native tribes {if 
that might le called a system which seemed to have teen guided ly 
no fixed princi^ohy certainly ly no just one) had become absolutely 
necessary." 

The hke testimony was, at the same period, borne 
by an intelligent and impartial Wesleyan missionary, 
the Eev. William Shaw.f 

" Not only has our Grovernment pursued no efficient measures 
for the improvement of the Kafir tribes, but the plan adopted 
for the regulation of the affairs of the frontier has been extremely 
injudicious. Instead of a regular system, well defined and pro- 
perly adapted to the circumstances of the country, and steadily 
acted upon, there has leen nothing Me a system at all. Sometimes 
the mode of treatment has been harsh and severe, at other times 
mild and conciliatory. Occasionally the Kafirs were almost 
frightened mto the belief that we intended their destruction, 
and at other times they were suffered to carry on their depre- 
dations with such impunity as to tempt them into the opinion 

'- Pari. Papers, 1835, vol. xxxix. p. 103, Native Inhabitants Cape 
of Good Hope. 

t lb. pp. 137-142. 

00 



562 ENGLAND AND 

that we were afraid of them. Threatenings were occasionally 
denounced, which were never ftilfiUed. The effects of this con- 
tradictory mode of proceeding upon an untutored but warlike 
race, strong from their number, may be easily imagined." 

On the second point the same writer continues : 

" In consequence of certain difficulties and scruples respecting 
international law (the absurdity of applying the strict rules of 
which in the intercourse between a civil and a barbarous people, 
I shall not now stop to prove), no dii-ect and official communica- 
tion betwixt the chiefs and the colonial authorities has yet been 
established." 

This state of things continued unaltered until the 
outbreak of the Kafir war of 1845, after which a 
decided change was made, and something like syste- 
matic government, and proper relations with the 
chiefs, were introduced into British Kafraria. 

But with the warning thus given before our eyes 
the identical mistake was made in New Zealand, as 
will appear from the recent testimony, in the year 
1860, of a government interpreter, who is described 
as possessing the most extensive information about 
"native doings.^ 

" The natives generally consider themselves an independent 
nation, and not amenalJe to British Jaiv. They discuss this sub- 
ject with great seriousness, and many of the tribes are warmly 
advocating the election of a Maori king, who will, it is supposed, 
be able to settle all their grievances and quiet the troubles of the 
land. It may be asked, what is being done to lessen the discon- 
tent which prevails every ivliere among the native people? The 
influence of the missionary bodies, in regard to the Maori popula- 
tion, has ceased; at present it is a mere shadow. The influence 
of government is daily becoming less, oiuing, in a great measure, 
to our want of system. It is altogether a mistaken notion to sup- 
pose that we are attaching the natives to us, and securing their 

* New Zealand Pari. Papers, 1860, quoted from Gorst's Maori 
King, p. 57. 



THE UNCIVILISED COMIMUNITIES. 563 

allegiance to the crown by the bestowment of presents and grant- 
ing loans. In most instances this is positively injurious, foster- 
ing idleness and covetousness, and causing the chiefs to lay aside 
that self-respect which raised them so far above the generality of 
barbarians." 

Again, speaking of the anarchy of native districts, 
and the growth and causes of the Maori king-move- 
ment, Mr. Gorst observes :* 

" So absolutely was Waikato neglected, that Mr. Ashwell 
stated, before a committee of the' House of Representatives, that, 
during nineteen years before the 'king-movement,' he could 
not remember more than three or four visits to the Waikato by 
officials. SovereigTity, or government, in the sense of a power 
strong enough to put down robbery and mm-der, and increase the 
common happiness by enforcing obedience to laws for the com- 
mon good, was a thing unknown to the natives of Xew Zealand 
when they signed the treaty of Waitangi, and is unknown to loyal 
and disloyal alike at the present day." 

The sentiments and habits produced by this state 
of non-government, not to say misrule, should be 
largely taken into account in our estimate of the 
moral condition of savages. In all attempts to rule 
barbarous communities, but more especially those 
populations which have been thus artificially brought 
into a condition of social anarchy, I beheve that a 
really strong government is essential; always, how- 
ever, remembering that the conditions of strength 
are — a wise use of power, for the benefit of the 
natives, a just regard to public opinion among them, 
and an especial consideration for their chiefs. Thus 
understood, I think the following remarksf are just, 
and of very general application : 

* Maori King^ p. 40. 

•f By Sir Henry Pottinger, Governor of the Cape in 1847 (after 
the Kafir war of 1845-6). Pari. Papers, 1847-8, vol. xliii. p. 43. 



564 ENGLAND AND 

" It appears to me eyident that the only method or chance of 
reclaiming and improving the moral and civil condition of these 
tribes is by placing them, for the present at least, under a strong 
and vigorous government, directed by a resolute will, by demon- 
strating to them beyond all doubt that they are at the mercy and 
disposal of that government, and by afterwards treating them 
with that humanity, kindness, and conciliation, which their con- 
duct and obedience may merit, and which is most worthy of a 
great civilised nation like England." 



III. Primitive Society and Western Europe. 

We see, then, that savage and semi- civilised com- 
munities present, with great variations in degree, 
marked features of resemblance among themselves, 
and no less of contrast with civilised society. Among 
these contrasts is very commonly placed an alleged in- 
capacity for progress.* Their advances are no doubt 
slow, and rarely pass certain limits. It cannot, how- 
ever, be thence justly concluded that they are incap- 
able of being raised by patience and judicious efforts; 
and, notwithstanding the great disadvantages of past 
mismanagement, experience affords some proof of the 
contrary. This view is, I think, sustained by the re- 
sults of modern inquiry,f combining the observations 
of travellers with surviving traditions and relics of 
the past. Under favourable and exceptional condi- 
tions, physical and social, the " savages of Europe"J 
developed themselves by slow degrees, and became 

■"' This view is fortified by dogmas, claiming the sanction of reli- 
gion, and sometimes even supported by misstating facts : see Tylor's 
Early History of ManJdnd^ pp. 160-2, for a striking example of such 
misstatement. 

f See Tylor, Early History of Mankind ; Lubbock, Prehistoric 
Times ; Wilson, Prehistoric Man; M'Lennan, Primitive Marriage. 

I Gribbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire^ chap. i. note 83. 



THE UNCIVILISED COMMUNITIES. 565 

the founders of classic society and culture. The 
du'ect progenitors of Greek* and Romanf antiquity 
partook deeply of the characteristics of savage commu- 
nities, and the civilisation of their descendants retained 
'plain traces of the primitive and fetishistic state of 
society. Rome, having by long effort raised herself 
to be the head of the ancient world, incorporated a 
great variety of tribes, to the full as savage as some 
which we have had to deal with. Military training, 
judicial J and administrative institutions, with a syste- 
matic initiation into her lano;ua2^e and the arts of 
peace, were the instruments of this transformation. 
The Middle Ages§ offer still nobler proofs of the just 
ascendency of civilised over savage man, through 
religious devoteclness, guided by practical wisdom, 
and fortified by intellectual and social superiority, 
their inheritance from imperial Rome. 

Modern history has little that is satisfactory to 
show as regards the influence of Europe on saA^age 
and semi-civilised communities, although the me- 
mory of Penn and his labours survive as a beacon 
amidst the general darkness. The four great mari- 
time and colonising powers of Western Europe — 

*' Mesnard, Du Pohjtheisme Hellenique. 
■\ Fustel de Coulanges, La Cite antique. 

% It hardly admits of doubt that the extraordinary flexibility as 
well as breadth of the Roman jurisprudence arose from the wise use 
which the authorities, in early times, uniting both civil and military 
jurisdiction, made of the contacts between the ruhng nation and the 
conquered populations of Italy. 

§ Two sources of this ascendency are well described in the follow- 
ing passage relative to the conversion of the German tribes in the 
eighth century to Christianity : "It was essential that those efforts 
and these missions should be associated with a strong political power, 
like that of the Franks, and a universal directing authority, like that of 
Rome." Zeller, Entretiens sur VHistoire, Moyen Age, p. 93. 



566 ENGLAND AND . 

Spain, England, Holland, and France* — have all, 
more or less, incurred this blame; proving that^ 
great as has been the progress of science and in-, 
dustry, the still nobler arts of government and mo- 
rality lag behind. f An examination of the historical 
relations of Western Europe with barbarous peoples 
cannot here be entered upon; but two remarks of 
a practical character connected with these relations 
may be offered. 

Independently of colonisation, the growth of com- 
merce and maritime enterprise has frequently led to 
difficulties between the European Powers themselves, 
arising out of these contacts with barbarous peoples. 
In recent times several such collisions have occurred 
between England and France. J These conflicts — 

* The European inhabitants in French colonies are subjected to 
an exceptional regime^ which, however necessary, excites the disappro- 
bation of those who claim the absolute equality of all Frenchmen 
before the law (see Debates on the Address in the Corps Legislatif, 
1866). The recent letter of the Emperor on the policy of France in 
Algeria, as regards both colonists and the Arab tribes, is a remarkable 
document ; worth studying, if only as showing the tendency of like 
situations to produce like results, despite of great differences as to race, 
religion, and institutions, 

■\ There can be no doubt that the greater homogeneity and closer 
resemblance, as regards social conditions and the arts of war and peace^ 
between ancient Rome and medissval Europe, and their respective sub- 
jects among the barbarous tribes, had a large influence in facilitating 
the gradual incorporation of the latter. The present imperfect con- 
stitution of science and industry opposes a great obstacle to the incor- 
poration of the people with the modern framework of European so- 
ciety ; much more then to the participation of barbarous communities 
in the civilisation of the nations of Western Europe. What causes the 
difficulty, however, is not our progress, but our incomplete and halting 
advance, through a long period of transition and anarchy, to a sound 
and normal condition of society. Of this the chief characteristics 
must hereafter be a wide sympathy and relative appreciation, supply- 
ing the place of physical and social affinities by comprehensive and 
persevering, and at the same time flexible, statesmanship. 

% For example, in the Society Islands (Otaheite) (see Gruizot, France 



THE UNCIVILISED COJkBIUNITIES. 567 

the results of pride of power, set in motion by mer- 
cantile cupidity, and not unfrequently fostered by 
religious fanaticism or. exclusiveness — are the more 
to be regretted, because the combined efforts and 
naval forces of the two leading European Powers 
should rather be directed towards the protection of 
feeble communities exposed to every attack from 
without, and too frequently the victims of rapacity 
and lawlessness. There are few subjects in relation 
to which the combined action of England and France 
is more needed than the establishment of an effective 
Naval Police, extending to all seas frequented by 
European commerce. 

Again, the comparison of Spanish and English 
colonisation presents a contrast which deserves a 
serious consideration. Notwithstanding her earlier 
barbarities towards the native West Indians, Spain* 
is almost the only European country whose govern- 
ment systematically instituted a social machinery for 
the protection and guidance of the aborigines, and 
who, chiefly through the labours of her clergy, has 
to a considerable extent incorporated the natives with 
the colonists. The real and honourable success of 
these effortsf is attested by the effective amalgama- 
tion, through intermarriage and otherwise, of a very 
considerable proportion of the natives of South Ame- 



under Louis Philijjpe, chap, ii, ; and Quarterly Bevieio, 1859, vol. cvi. 
" The Islands of the Pacific") and in the Sandwich Islands (see Manley 
Hopkins, Sandwich Islands). 

* See the remarks of Mr. Merivale, Colonisation and the Colonies, 
p. 6. 

f See Murray's Encyclopedia of Geograiihy, part iii. book iv. ; 
Malte-Brun's Geographie; Knight's Cyclopedia of Geography, l^bb', 
Fullarton's Gazetteer of the World, 1859 ; and M'CuUoch's Geographical 
Dictionary. 



568 ENGLAND AND 

rica with the European civilisation, and the preserva- 
tion of a large number in their original condition. 
Thus in Mexico, out of a population computed to 
number about 5,000,000, the mixed castes (Mulattos 
and Mestizos) were estimated by Humboldt at 
2,400,000; while the Indians, descendants of the 
original possessors of Mexico, survived to the sup- 
posed amount of 2,500,000, and were more than 
twice as numerous as the white race. In Brazil, 
Peru, Chili, and other states of South America (al- 
though no accurate census of the population exists), 
there is every reason to believe that a very large pro- 
portion of the Europeanised classes are the offspring 
of mixed marriages; while a certain, and in some 
cases even a considerable, part of the native inhabi- 
tants has been more or less civilised; though, no 
doubt, there is much room, here as elsewhere, for 
further improvement and a better treatment of the 
aborigines. 

On the other hand, it is with some a fixed creed, 
that by a law of nature, as is alleged, aborigines 
must give wa}^ before English colonisation ; and this 
supposed necessity is set down not to our deficiency 
in wisdom or forbearance, but to the superiority of 
the Anglo-Saxon race. On this head the following 
remarks* deserve consideration, since, though made 
vdth special reference to India, they are quite as 
applicable to the subject of this essay. 

" It is greatly to be desired, on very many accounts, that there 
should be the freest and largest possible access of Englishmen. 
At the same time, for the protection of the people from the Anglo- 

'^ Evidence of E. D. Mangles, Esq., Parliamentary Papers, 1859, 
sec. 1, vol. iv. " Colonisation and Settlement of India,'- p. 5 ; see also 
the excellent remarks in Hursthouse's New Zealand^ p. 112. 



THE UNCIVILISED COMMUNITIES. 569 

Saxon, — whom I do not believe to be an altogether harmless, or, 
as some of the witnesses described him to the committee, even a 
highly-beneficent animal, — nnder such circumstances, I think it 
is essential that there should be sufficient safeguards for the pro- 
tection of native rights and interests. I believe that those rights 
and interests are in much more danger from European settlers 
than from the Government; at the same time, I wish it to be un- 
derstood that I am now, and have always been, an advocate in 
the strongest sense for the largest possible admission of English- 
men. But I wish the Government and the courts of justice to 
be strengthened, so as to be able to deal with them, and to pre- 
vent them from doing wrong and doing mischief, where they 
might do such great good." 

IV. England and hee Eelations with Savage and 
Semi-civilised Communities. 

The dispositions referred to in tlie passage just 
quoted are due far less to peculiarities of race than 
to the course of social development in England. The 
main features of English history have deeply in- 
fluenced English character. The most pervading and 
general of these historic characteristics, and one 
closely connected with the present subject, is that 
spirit of national isolation, and even exclusiveness, 
which renders it so difficult for English governors 
and colonists to assimilate with and adapt themselves, 
their ways, and their laws to diiFering societies. If 
this tendency makes itself felt in our intercourse mth 
Western nations, how much more must it influence 
our relations with extra-occidental communities, and, 
most of all, with those incapable of offering any solid 
resistance to encroachment.* 

■"' See an article entitled " Government under exceptional circum- 
stances," Pali-Mall Gazette, 13th February 1866. " We have bungled 
Ireland ; we have bungled India ; we have bungled Jamaica ; we have 
mismanaged Celts, Kafirs, Hindoos, Maoris, and Negroes ; and all from 



570 ENGLAND AND 

Among her historic features as developed in mo- 
dern England, three of the principal also require a 
brief notice, since they have materially influenced our 
relations with savage and semi- civilised communities. 
I refer to her Protestantism, Parliamentary govern- 
ment, and Maritime power.* 

The situation of Great Britain brings her, beyond 
any other power, into direct communication with the 
uncivilised nations of the earth ;f and this is owing 
to the voyages of discovery which, during the last 
three centuries, but more especially in the eighteenth 
century, gave England her vast colonial dominions. 
As regards barbarous tribes, the relations thus esta- 
blished have been of two kinds, external or internal; 
that is, either simply commercial and diplomatic, or 
colonial and governmental. Such external relations 
are in many cases simply maritime, as, for example, 
in the Pacific, where our commerce is so extended 
and increasing. Experience has abundantly sho^vn 
the urgent want of tribunals armed with sufficient 
powers to prevent and punish wrongs, there too fre- 
quently committed with impunity by British subjects 



the same cause — because we have refused to see that they were not 
Englishmen, or have fancied that we could make them Englishmen." 
See also " The Anglo-Saxon let loose," Spectator^ 24th March 1866. 
For a striking example of the evil effects accruing to native populations 
from the working of English laws and the total want of any adaptation 
of them to a different state of society, see the judicious remarks of 
Mr. Gorst, in his Maori King^ on our disgraceful laws respecting se- 
duction and adultery, and their working among the aborigines of New 
Zealand. A great part of the difficulties as to the land question in 
New Zealand, both socially and politically, has also sprung from the 
unpliant character of English law, and the neglect to adapt it by legis- 
lative enactment to native ideas and institutions. 

* The complete development of these may be respectively referred 
to the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. 

f Aborigines Report, Parliamentary Papers, 1837, vol. vii. p. 3. 



THE UNCIVILISED COMMUNITIES. 571 

on those feeble insular communities.* External re- 
lations of a territorial character frequently arise in 
English settlements with reference to bordering tribes. 
These relations have hitherto too generally been of a 
warlike and unsatisfactory character; although, in 
more recent times, efforts to place things on a better 
footing have been prosecuted with some success. f 

The second class of relations, the internal or go- 
vernmental, springs from colonisation ; and these have 
been largely influenced by our religious and politi- 
cal characteristics — Protestantism and Parliamentary 
government. 

Eespect and gratitude are deeply due to the va- 
rious Protestant Churches who originated and carried 
through or aided the great movement for the aboli- 
tion of slavery. To their influence also is owing, in 
great measure, the increasing interest felt in the ab- 
origines inhabiting our colonies. J The gradual aban- 
donment of transportation — a measure justly asso- 
ciated with the name of a late eminent and humane 
prelate (Dr. Whately) — also deserves special men- 

■'' See some judicious remarks in the Quarterly Review ^ June 1854, 
pp. 177-9. 

f As to the Kafir tribes bordering on British Kafraria and Natal, 
see Quarterly Review, 1860, vol. cviii., "The Cape and South Africa;'* 
and Hansard's Delates^ 1865. As to the West Coast of Africa and 
the tribes which encompass our settlements, see Earl Grey's Colonial 
Policy ; but compare the Report on the Western Coast of Africa, Par- 
hamentary Papers, 1865, No. 412. 

% The Aborigines Report and Evidence (ParHamentary Papers, 
1836, vol. vii.; and 1837, vol. vii.) contain much that is interesting. 
The report is, indeed, too deeply tinged with the onesidedness and 
defects of the " missionary policy" already described (see Bannister's 
British Colonies and the Coloured Races); yet some of the recommend- 
ations have great practical value ; for example, the inexpediency of 
treaties ; the necessity for a steady administration in dealings with 
natives ; and visits by ships of war with a judicial commission. 



572 ENGLAND AND 

tion, as having removed a fatal blot, which deformed 
our earlier colonisation and lamentably affected the 
destinies of the aborigines of the English convict set- 
tlements.* There is, however, another side to the 
picture, a reference to which is required in the inter- 
ests both of truth and practical wisdom. I pass over 
the too abstract character of Protestant propagand- 
ism;f its preponderant dwelling upon the Old Tes- 
tament;! and the antipathies not unfrequently mani- 
fested towards other Churches, and even among the 
various Protestant denominations. § These often have 
importance with reference to natives; yet they are 
secondary as compared with the influence of what has 
not unaptly been called the " Missionary Policy." 
Its leading characteristic consists, as already pointed 
out, in an attitude of well-intended, but weak and 
often misleading, patronage towards the natives ; 
of mistrust, exclusiveness, and at times hostility to- 
wards the colonists. It is true that in former times 
the neglect of the imperial government, and the in- 
ferior character of our colonisation, and also in some 
cases — especially as regards the slave colonies — the 
total falsity of the relations between classes, seemed 
to render any other course impossible. Yet there is 
some reason for believing that better results would, 

* Parliamentary Papers, 1844, vol. xxxiv. Australian Aborigines, 
N'ew South Wales, pp. 1-335. 

■f Parliamentary Papers, 1844, vol. xxxiv., Australian Aborigines. 

J "Pai Marire," Fraser's Magazine, October 1865. 

§ Thomson's NeiD Zealand, vol. i. p. 322. A Maori chief wrote to 
Queen Victoria as follows : " When the missionaries first came, they 
(the natives) were told the Church of England was the only true 
Church ; hut there are noio three true Churches'' (Anglican, Vv''esleyan, 
and Eoman Catholic). Parliamentary Papers, 1850, quoted in Thom- 
son, vol. i. p. 322. See also Vacation Tourists, 1863-4 ; and Lady D. Gor- 
don's Letters from the Cape. 



THE UNCIVILISED COMMUNITIES. 573 

even under the most disadvantageous circumstances, 
liave followed, had the missionaries entertained 
juster and completer \dews of the real wants of the 
natives, and urged these persistently, but in a more 
conciliating spirit, upon the colonists, the local and 
imperial government, and the British public* The 
difficulties incident to the contact of colonists with 
natives are in themselves sufficiently great; and, 
having regard to the improved character of our sett- 
lers, and the increased power of public opinion every 
where, I cannot but see grave dangers in according 
a predominant influence to the " missionary policy," 
whether propounded by ' aborigines' protection so- 
cieties' or missionaries. 

The Parliamentary system, so characteristic of 
England, has materially influenced her relations with 
savao^e and semi-civilised communities. These relations 
have been, indirectly but very powerfully, aflfected 
by each of the three successive phases of the Colonial 
policy pursued by Great Britain. During the earliest 
and longest phase, which is especially illustrated by 
the Xorth American colonies, the colonists seem to 
have been left extremely free as regards the internal 
administration, of aflxiirs,f and under this head was 
classed their deahngs with the aborigines. The 
treatment these received is certainly not calculated 
to inspire much confidence in the views and conduct 
of colonists when left entirely to themselves. Yet 

■' I have been struck, in perusing the papers and works relating 
both to the Cape and New Zealand, to find that the Weslejan mis- 
sionaries have combined an independent attitude with a spirit of fair- 
ness, which, far from injuring their influence, has tended to give a just 
weight to theh' counsels as regards the treatment of the natives. 

-f- See Merivale's Colonisation and the Colonies, and Lord Bury's 
Exodus of the Western Nations. 



574 ENGLAND AND 

in applying this experience, a large allowance must 
be made for the improved morality and increased 
force of public opinion in our own times; changes 
which, directly and indirectly, have already influenced 
and, it may be expected, will more and more in- 
fluence the character of British emigrants and colo- 
nial society.* Besides, competent authoritiesf have 
come to the conclusion that the sufi'erings endured 
by the aborigines under the earliest regime were 
little, if at all, diminished, or their lot improved 
under the second phase of British parliamentary rule. 
The leadmg characteristic of this second phase 
was that concentration of power and increased con- 
trol by the Imperial government, which, commencing 
with the American revolution and greatly augmented 
during the war with France, was continued down 
to a very recent period. The administration of 
native affairs in "Crown colonies" by the Go- 
vernor, assisted only by a legislative council nomi- 
nated by himself, has presented, during the first 
half of the nineteenth century, especially in its 
second generation, and since the awakening of 
public sympathy with oppressed or neglected co- 
loured races, much valuable experience and many 
honourable efforts. Yet it does not possess that 
complete character of excellence which could entitle 
us to hold up this phase of imperial policy as a model 

'■'^ It must, however, be remembered that this amelioration in the 
character of the emigrants only takes place slowly, and varies ex- 
tremely with the colony and even with the particular locality in the 
same colony. Moreover, at the best, there always is a considerable 
infusion of inferior emigrants, who do not, as in old countries, recog- 
nise the social ascendency of their more educated and better disposed 
fellow- colonists. 

f See the evidence of Mr. Gladstone, Colonial Military Expendi- 
ture, Pari. Papers, 1861, vol. xiii. ev. 3861. 



THE UNCIVILISED COMMUNITIES. 575 

of wisdom and humanity, even if altered circum- 
stances permitted its unmodified continuance. Fairly 
to judge this Imperial regime^ however, and its 
dealings with the aborigines, it is essential to bear 
in mind two matters. The great difficulties it en- 
countered, — in some cases inherited from the earlier 
jDolicy of laissez-faire^ in others created by the home 
government, — presented serious obstacles to its 
success. Again, even where such difficulties were 
absent, we have to take largely into account the 
extreme imperfection of our knowledge of native 
society, and our ignorance of the best mode of go- 
verning the aborigines, aggravated, not unfrequently, 
by insufficient funds, and the constant pressure of 
immigration. As an example of the first class of 
difficulties thus artificially created, may be cited the 
Cape of Good Hope, where the unrestricted and 
unregulated colonisation, tolerated, if not sanctioned, 
by the Dutch Government down to the final cession 
of the colony to England in 1806, laid the foundation 
of the chief obstacles encountered by the British 
governors. Under the same class fall the colonies of 
New South Wales and Tasmania, in which the trans- 
portation system almost completely neutralised the 
efforts made to save and improve the aborigines; 
efforts which, it should be stated, were approved and 
aided by the colonists.* The second class of difficul- 
ties is but too well illustrated by the case of New 
Zealand. There also, no doubt, the antecedents and 
circumstances of our colonisation largely and injuri- 
ously influenced the result. Yet the errors and short- 
comings of the Imperial policy, previous to the intro- 

* See Pari. Papers, 1844, vol. xxxiv. Aborigines Australian Colo- 
nies, New South Wales, South Australia, and Western Australia. 



576 ENGLAND AND 

cluction of representative institutions into the colony, 
are mainly attributable to an insufficient appreciation 
of the great obstacles to be overcome in raising a sa- 
vage community, however naturally superior the race 
may be, to civilisation, and the want of a comprehen- 
sive plan, early begun, and persistently followed, for 
the protection, guidance, and incorporation of the 
Maoris. Thus, for example, as has been already 
pointed out, the important bearings of " systematic 
colonisation" were never understood in reference to 
them or made an integral part of our native policy. 

A few indications must suffice for the third and 
momentous phase of Colonial policy, upon which we 
have recently entered. In reference to this phase it 
has been justly said :* 

" To turn to our own colonies, was there ever sucli a task given 
to any nation as is given to us ? I will not despair of the greatest 
problem ever given to any race being solved by us — the problem 
of how a colony, when it has arrived at maturity, may yet remain 
in alliance with the mother country." 

The last five-and-twenty years have developed in 
our principal colonies a growing reaction against the 
preponderance of the Imperial government, which 
has finally resulted in a state of semi- emancipation, 
indicated by the granting of representative institu- 
tions. This new phase has created and actually pre- 
sents manifold difficulties in reference to a just and 
humane treatment of the aborigines. With regard 
to them, the later direction of the imperial policy 
at least tended to acquire a character of greater dis- 
interestedness, comprehensiveness, and steadiness, 
qualities essential for the government of natives by 

* Speech of Mr. W. E. Forster, M.P., at Bradford, 10th January 
1865. 



THE UNCIVILISED COMMUNITIES. 577 

Europeans. The continuance of such a policy was 
deeply compromised by the new system of colonial 
self-government, especially in its earlier period of 
transition. That this was in fact the case hardly 
admits of doubt, and two obvious reasons can be 
assigned for the result. The colonial Assembly, exer- 
cising control over the finances of the colony, could 
practically defeat any scheme of the Imperial go- 
vernment or its representative for the management 
of the natives, for which funds had not been pro- 
vided by the British Parliament, or reserved under 
express stipulation out of colonial funds. Again, the 
assembly, even while abandoning the administration 
of native aiFairs, might, in the absence of any express 
stipulation, claim legislative authority over the natives, 
— perhaps more numerous than the settlers, — who 
were neither socially fitted, nor politically qualified, 
to take any effective share in the so-called represen- 
tative government. Thus was too often created a 
disastrous system of double government, there being 
nowhere any effective power, or consequently any real 
responsibility. 

For the full comprehension of this aspect of our 
subject, it is further necessary to consider, that this 
third and actual phase of colonial policy has been, 
and must continue to be, essentially a compromise, 
and therefore presents the difficulties and dangers 
inherent in every transitional policy. Viewed in this 
light a distinction is observable, the practical im,port- 
ance of which has not, I think, been adequately appre- 
ciated, between colonies which only received a repre- 
sentative constitution, and those which also demanded 
and obtained a complete parliamentary system. The 
first conferred on the colony the control of the fin- 

pp 



578 ENGLAND AND 

ances and legislative power ; the second superadded mi- 
nisters responsible to an assembly owing no allegiance 
to the governor, but in every way controlling liim. 
The constitution of the Cape of Good Hope (granted 
in 1850) furnishes an example of the former class, 
and the history of this colony with reference to 
British Kafraria proves that such an arrangement, 
when bona fide accepted by the colonists and accom- 
panied by judicious stipulations, is not only consistent 
with, but conducive to, a wise and successful native 
policy. The history of New Zealand, on the other 
hand, since the granting of the constitution in 1853, 
but particularly since the establishment of a respon- 
sible ministry in 1856, reveals the complications and 
dangers which must attend a double government — 
one side representing the crown, and having com- 
mand of the army, the other representing the co- 
lony, and holding the purse, — where better arrange- 
ments are not made by the political forethought of 
imperial statesmen, or their place supplied by a wise 
moderation, hardly to be expected from a young and 
aspiring assembly of half- emancipated colonists.* 

* Much valuable information on this topic will be found in the 
report on Colonial Military Expenditure, Pari. Papers, 1861, vol, xiii. 
See the resolutions of the Select Committee, Report, p. 6, and particu- 
larly resolution 11, as to the mode in which the mother country should 
conduct her colonial policy ; and especially the expediency of not nego- 
tiating^ but simply announcing to the colony — of course, after due 
inquiry, and even consultation, where this is feasible — the terms on 
which alone imperial assistance, naval, military, or otherwise, will be 
granted. 



THE UNCIVILISED COMMUNITIES. 



579 



Y. The Colonies as interimediate links between 
England and Savage or Semi- Civilised Commu- 
nities. 

The Coloured and White population of the principal British 
colonies, taken from the Colonial census, 1860-1. Pari. Papers, 
1863, No. 147. 



Africa. 

West Coast of Africa .... 

Southern Africa, Cape of Good 

Hope and British Kafraria . 

Natal 


Coloured. 

199,517 

129,167 
145,633 
307,200 


White. 
392 

102,156 
11,950 


Mauritius 


2,850 


Total in or near Africa 


781,517 


117,348 


America. 

ITorth America (not including 
Hudson's Bay Company) . . 

West Indies (islands and main- 
land) 


34,807 
967,294 


3,259,754 
54,650 


Total in America 


1,002,101 


3,314,404 


Australasia — Australia. 

New South Wales 

Victoria 

Queensland 

South Australia 

Western Australia 

Tasmania 


14,589 

26,704 

15,000 

765 

No return 

8 


351,046 

522,240 
41,000 

126,065 
15,691 
90,209 


Total in Australia (exclusiye of 
Western Australia) . . . 


57,066 


1,146,251 


New Zealand. 


56,049 


99,021 


Grand total 


1,896,733 


4,677,024 



580 ENGLAND AND 

The foregoing table shows the comparative num- 
ber of the coloured and white populations of the 
principal British colonies, excluding territories which 
are simply military stations or mercantile factories. 
The native populations of all these colonies have a 
certain similitude to each other, which is best de- 
scribed by their profound contrast with the character 
common to the Asiatic nations referred to in the pre- 
vious essays. The populations of India, China, and 
Japan possess an ancient civilisation and organised 
social life, generally speaking imbued with a theo- 
cratic element or something equivalent thereto, and 
presenting a strong resistance to Euro^^ean encroach- 
ments. On the other hand, the communities inhabit- 
ing our colonial possessions have little social union, 
and no such political coherence as could enable them 
to withstand the disintegrating influence of colonial 
contacts. A second contrast between the subject of 
this and the preceding essays is presented by the 
comparative numbers of the European population in 
the Asiatic regions and our colonial possessions. In 
the subject provinces of India, and still more in the 
mercantile factories of China and Japan, the English 
inhabitants are relatively few, and rarely acquire the 
ideas and habits of permanent settlers. No doubt 
some of our so-called colonies also partake of this 
character, as for example the British settlements of 
Western Africa and the Mauritius. The same may be 
stated even as to the West Indies, although these 
last approximate much more nearly to the type of 
genuine colonies, those in which the European popula- 
tion not only preponderates politically but settles per- 
manently, steadily if not rapidly increasing in number.* 

* See the interesting work by M. Duval, entitled Histoire de VEmi- 
groiion Euro;peenne, 1862. 



THE UNCIVILISED CO^IMUNITIES. 581 

The British colonies, thus regarded and charac- 
terised, present two very distinct types, which, 
though no doubt having certain points in common, 
require to be carefully distinguished. The first class 
includes those colonial settlements in which the na- 
tives have long been, to a certam extent, incorpo- 
rated; such incorporation, however, mainly consist- 
mg in an enforced submission to the European laws 
and administration, with httle or no participation in 
the social advantages of European civilisation. The 
second class of colonies embraces native populations 
which, although they may in some degree indirectly 
participate in the benefits of European civilisation, 
and may even recognise our formal sovereignty, have 
maintained, more or less, socially and politically, an 
independent and national existence. The attitude 
of the native population in the former class of colo- 
nies is, generally speaking, peaceful, submissive, and 
even ser^dle ; that of the native inhabitants of the 
latter class, if not openly hostile to the colonists, at 
least threatens disturbance and war. The one class 
is typified in the Hottentot population of the Cape, 
and the negroes of the West Indies ; the other is re- 
presented by the Kafirs (British Kafraria and Natal), 
and the Maoris. 

Each of these types of our colonial relations with 
aborigines would merit a separate and careful ex- 
amination ; but the unavoidable limits of this essay, 
with other reasons,* induce me to select that which 

* In accordance with the importance -which should be attached to 
a just method for the solution of the difficult problems involved in the 
relations between civilised and uncivilised man, I would ask attention 
to a principle, too httle regarded, viz. that of proceeding from the 
simple to the complex. This principle would, I believe, alone justify 
the prior treatment of the second class of cases above referred to. No 



582 ENGLAND AND 

is presented by the history of our colonisation at the 
Cape of Good Hope and in New Zealand. 

YI. The Cape of Good Hope* and New Zealand. 

The adoption of a sound practical policy towards 
the aborigines depends, I believe, to a much greater 
extent than is commonly supposed, on the union of 
views, at once comprehensive and accurate, respect- 
ing the characteristics of savage life, and the situa- 



doubt these have their own peculiar complexities ; but, on the whole, 
the questions they present appear to be of a simpler character than 
those arising out of the first. The first class (ex. gr. Hottentots and 
West Indian Negroes) present one common point of extreme diffi- 
culty — the long- continued Slavery of the native population followed 
by a sudden emancipation, for meeting the dangers of which no 
adequate provision was made, or indeed thought of. In addition to 
this feature, the West Indian black population were forcibly trans- 
ported from their original native soil, and placed under the rule of an 
inconsiderable number of a wholly different nationahty and civilisa- 
tion ; here also no systematic provision having been made for meeting 
the grave changes, social and poHtical, involved in the conversion of 
the relation of master and slave into that of employer and free labourer. 
It is hardly necessary to add that the inquiry now pending in Jamaica 
may be expected to throw additional light on the general question of 
the condition and prospects of the Negroes under white rule, as well as 
on the lamentable circumstances which have given it such great promi- 
nence at the present time. It may be useful to mention the following 
works as containing, it is believed, important and trustworthy informa- 
tion on this subject : Sewell's i^ree Labour in the West Indies; Bigelow's 
Jamaica; two papers published by the Statistical and Social In- 
quiry Society of Ireland, by W. NeUson Hancock and the late Kichard 
Hussey Walsh respectively, on the " Abolition of Slavery in the West 
Indies" (1852), and the " State of Landed Property in Jamaica" (1856). 
* As before stated, the Hottentot population inhabiting the west- 
ern districts of the Cape are not here considered. They have long 
been incorporated, to a certain extent, with the colony, though pre- 
vious to 1833 (the date of the Slave Emancipation Act) their condi- 
tion was one of actual or virtual servitude ; even those who were not 
slaves being incapable of holding land, subjected to severe restrictions 
as to contracts for labour, and unprovided with any means of educa- 



THE UNCIVILISED CO^BIUNITIES. 583 

tion of native communities, with just conceptions of 
the historic development of the nations that com- 
pose Western Europe. The illustrations already 
given, and intended to enforce this principle, have 
been chiefly furnished by two English colonies, se- 
lected as being strikingly confirmative of it. It is 
not possible here to present a detailed account of 
the Cape of Good II ope or K^ew Zealand, and their 
lengthened and complicated history ; but the following 
brief sketch of each may, it is hoped, at least assist 
independent inquiry, and illustrate some general 
views of practical importance. These two colonies 
are grouped together, because they present remark- 
able points both of resemblance and of contrast. 
Philosophically considered, they prove the subor- 
dination of race to social development. Long re- 
garded as "irreclaimable savages," the Kafirs are 
now, it may be hoped, undergoing a gradual amelio- 
ration, the result of an improved government, which, 
if made sufficiently comprehensive, and persevered 
in, bids fair to succeed. On the other hand, the 
undoubted mental superiority of the Maoris has not 



tion (see a Report on the Hottentot Population, Pari. Papers, 1838, 
vol. xxi., and Bunbury's Cajje). The effects of their enslaved and 
neglected condition survive their legal emancipation, and appear, as 
far as I can learn, to continue without much change for the better. 
It may be added that the insufficient compensation awarded to the 
Dutch slaveholders at the Cape by the British Government (see Na- 
pier's South Africa) nearly drove them into rebellion. This, with 
other causes of discontent, caused an extensive emigration, the result 
of which was an attempt (defeated, however,) to colonise Natal, 1842-5, 
and the foundation of two independent states on the northern bound- 
ary of the Cape colony — viz. the Trans-Vaal Repubhc, and the Orange 
River Free State. The Dutch inhabitants of the latter have been for 
some months past, and still are, at war with the Bassoutos, native 
inhabitants of the territory between them and Natal, and also branches 
of the Kafir tribes. 



584 ENGLAND AND 

averted the melancholy consequences of a policy 
which, with excellent aims, overlooked or miscon- 
ceived the essential conditions of a very difficult 
problem. Historically regarded, the circumstances 
of these two settlements differed widely. The Cape 
was an ancient colony acquired by conquest, and 
inheriting difficulties which sprang from previous 
neglect and mismanagement; while New Zealand, 
a British settlement comparatively modern, was os- 
tensibly colonised in accordance with principles of 
justice and humanity, though here also the European 
contacts antecedent to systematic colonisation created 
great difficulties. Their later development also has 
diverged; since the conversion of a crown colony into 
one endowed with representative institutions has in 
the first case wrought no harm; in the second the 
same change, somewhat differently carried out, in- 
creased existino^ and created new evils. When these 
considerations are duly combined, and supplemented 
mth a study of the respective localities, it is be- 
lieved that a comparison of the two colonies may 
afford lessons of practical moment, affecting the 
future policy of England towards savage and semi- 
civihsed communities. 



THE KAFIRS.* 

When conquest (1806), confirmed by the Treaty 
of Vienna, converted the original settlement of the 

* The Map has been constructed for the illustration of this essay. 
The following books may be consulted with advantage, in addition to 
the Parliamentary Papers : Napier's South Africa ; Mrs. Ward's Kafir 
Wars; Bunbury's Cape; Cole, The Cape and the Kafirs; The Quarterly 
RevieiD, 1860, vol. cviii. "The Cape and South Africa;" Casahs, Xes 
Bassoutos; the Rev. L. Grout's Zulu-Land (Natal). 



tv faxx. pagt584. 



THE CAPE of GOOD HOPE 

BRITISH KAFFRARIA. 

AND NATAL. 

to jl/ustrute the last E.ssua/ aiu 

tJix to raff a relatiloris 

of£nglaml. 




Population . 
CAPE OF GOOD HOPE. I BRITISH KAFFRARIA 

White 173, 689 I . - - - 8-M2 

CoZoreA. . 297, d06. 96, C1? 



NATAL. 
- 71.&O0 



■fFormerb/ called, the- 

Zuitrereld/. 
^Ibrmeriy axlled the 
Ceded. Terrt/cry. 

I tttx/verriedas a Separate 
' 2fitit/ir}- depenilency cf 
I tJie Cape 184-7-61 : then, 
niu-de OyCrGarv Cblorty h 
irtJ865.ajwiexed,to the 
o Cape. 



NATIVE 
KAFFRARIA 




Vlnceniiirooks.lith London 



586 ENGLAND AND 

ferior chief, mistakenly assumed to have authority 
over the neighbouring tribes, as a consequence of 
violating which, punishment by confiscation of ter- 
ritory was inflicted on this chief for not enforcing 
what he had no power to enforce, and on the other 
chiefs for not performing what they never promised 
to perform. The Zuurefeld was then constituted the 
province of Albany, and (1820) peopled with British 
colonists. At the same time it Avas stipulated that 
the eastward district, between the Fish and Keis- 
kamma Rivers, should remain unoccupied; but this 
agreement was never enforced, and the tribes, — at 
times allowed to occujDy the so-called " ceded terri- 
tory," their ancient haunts, consecrated by ancestral 
memories and tombs, at times capriciously expelled, 
even to make room for hated enemies (the Hottentot 
Kat Elver settlement), — again broke into the colony. 
This second war of 1834-5 might have been followed 
by better arrangements, afterwards adopted (1846- 
52), but set aside by the "missionary policy" then 
supreme in the Colonial Office. Thus matters went 
back to their former state, and a truce of ten years 
was followed by the third and most formidable strug- 
gle, extending from 1846 to 1852. 

Since that time there have been occasional threat- 
enings (particularly of a rising in 1857), but they 
have rather indicated the diminished force of the 
dangerous tendencies of savage life, and the growing 
ascendency of European civilisation and British go- 
vernment. This result, though doubtless aided by 
circumstances, is mainly due to wiser arrangements, 
and a juster, more humane, and firmer administra- 
tion. It is sufficient to say that the reorganisation 
here indicated, prepared by Governors Pottinger, 



THE UNCIVILISED COMMUNITIES. 587 

Smith, and Cathcart (1846-54:), and developed by 
Sir George Grey (1854-61), was based on territorial 
arrangements under which the '' ceded territory" 
was erected into the British province of Victoria, 
and "British Kafraria," situate between the Keis- 
kamma and Kei rivers, was constituted a military 
dependency of the Cape colony, and placed under 
the imdi^ided rule of the governor. Part was set 
aside as a " Crown-reserve" (see Map), a mountainous 
district containing the strongholds of the tribes, who 
were removed thence into the lower country, as being 
less adapted for aggression, and more favourable to 
agricultural pursuits, which have been since duly 
encouraged. The British authorities wisely resist- 
ing the suggestions of a portion of the colonists, and 
having regard to the real cause of the native out- 
breaks, based their territorial arrangements neither 
on confiscation, — whether as a punishment or an illu- 
sory de\ice for papng the cost of war, — nor on colo- 
nisation, but on considerations of government. These 
embraced military and civil control; the first being 
organised through the Eeserve and various Forts (see 
Map), the second through administrative measures, — 
political superintendents, magistrates, and an armed 
police, — combined with industrial and educational 
agencies, including public works — roads, irrigation, 
&c. — and schools. The whole scheme was conso- 
lidated by wise financial arrangements; the entire 
cost of governing the dependency being estimated at 
100,000/. per annum, of which the Imperial exche- 
quer gave 40,000/., the Colony (for an armed police 
of 750 men) 40,000/., while a hut-tax with other 
native taxes supplied the balance. It is only just to 
add that the colonial Representative Assembly (first 



588 ENGLAND AND 

created in 1850) concurred in these financial ar- 
rangements. With the increasing revenue of the 
native territory, still scantily inhabited by settlers, 
and the continuance of security, the Imperial grant 
has been gradually diminished, and finally with- 
drawn f^ while British Kafraria was last yearf 
united with the Cape colony. Though the excep- 
tional government -will thus be, in form, discon- 
tinued, in substance it must long be necessary. It 
is to be hoped that no sudden change in the admi- 
nistration may be introduced, but that governor and 
colony will harmoniously cooperate in just and po- 
litic measures for the effective incorporation of fel- 
low subjects still very backward, and who must of 
necessity long continue to be practically unrepre- 
sented in the Colonial Assembly.! 



THE MAORIS.§ 

The characteristics of Maori society, and the his- 
torical development of English civilisation, have com- 

* The imperial military expenditure is still, however, very large, 
over 280,000^. for 1865-6, including the Imperial ' Cape Mounted Rifles.' 

f 28 Vict, c. 5, and see Hansard's Debates, 1865. 

% It is worthy of attention that the Cape of Good Hope is now 
presenting the two constitutional difficulties so strongly illustrated by 
New Zealand, viz. the wish of the colonists for " responsible govern- 
ment," and their anxiety for local, as distinguished from central, go- 
vernment. As to the first point, great care will be requisite ; as to the 
second, both colonies have suffered from not attending to the principle 
which subordinates political arrangements to social grouping and his- 
torical development. (See below, p. 593 ; and the observations in 
Wilmot, Cape of Good Hope, pp. 24-5.) 

§ The Map is based on several embodied in recent Pari. Papers. 
The following works, among others, have been consulted : Thomson, 
Story of New Zealand, 1859 ; Hursthouse, New Zealand, 2d ed. 1861 ; 
Hockstetter, Neu-Seeland, 1863 ; Westminster Rev. vol. xxv, 1864, " New 



lU5 



NOf^TH 

P^'tTt 

i ^ (liie P] 

NGATI 




^'^^ThV^^^ 



)Dm£*^' 



oO£i^- 



k^^S 









0_^ 



iz/z//. 



S^- 



iV. 



^Thts 



0^p 

to illusUale the 

WANGANUI CAMPAIGN 



fiogtSSS 



AND TARANAK 




Map 
Shewing appraKi/naJ^ly 
I. 77ir. Dif-lnrls oriffirialfy 
proposed/ he- uvcLudei/. ' 
wif/wi' the' o/iej'a/oori 
vf iJu- Ncjw Zeaiay/i 
Sctd<',riie4U^ AcO. I8(;:i" 
marked thus ~w„w«vw«v»w» 
;' 'Hit '/iurilary proposed 
to be c.ord'i\scnlrfl. in. 
the Wa/k^/M couiUiy, 
kPivvific^, of TaranxiH 
idmiii' Nrw Pl,y'iu)i4/h'i- 
i/n: Warii/iaiu/, (jtmtrtcj. 
iiidiuled id iJte Pror/xj : 
matioii/ u'H'ued' Iry (/i£ 
l/ie, /7^' Dec': 
ar/.al.tJtAA.'il bliii: 



THE UNCIVILISED CO]\rMUNITIES. 589 

bined to produce peculiar complications in Xew 
Zealand. I propose briefly to indicate their origin 
and results. 

First Period : p'eceding the British settlement {ctlout 1400 A.r>. 
—1840). 

The Maoris, of Polynesian origin (see Map), were 
estimated by Captain Cook (1769) at about 100,000; 
while their numbers do not now exceed 56,000. 
They have always lived partly by the spontaneous 
produce of the sea, rivers, and land, partly by a rude 
nomadic agriculture. The difficulties, direct and in- 
direct, arising out of the tribal tenure, have been 
already pointed out. The Maoris showed a great 
aptitude for acquiring European ideas; though, for 
want of better culture, the acquisition has been su- 
perficial only. They were also great travellers, and 
eager for information, knowing all that passed m their 
own islands, and much elsewhere. Their numerous 
and scattered tribes, each consisting of from 10 to 50 
families, were located m villages and pas (see Map), 
some inland on lakes and rivers, but the majority along 
the coast. They had early apportioned among them- 
selves and claimed the entire islands ; but the great 
mass of the natives were inhabitants of the JNTorth 
Island, and especially of its northernmost portion.^ 

The antecedents of this British settlement were 



Zealand ;*' Gorst, Maori King ^ 1864 ; Fraser's Magazine^ Oct. 1865, " Pai 
Marire ;" Fortniglitly Review^ Nov. 1, 1865, "Maori Mohammedanism ;" 
Busby, New Zealand^ 1865 ; Fox, The War in New Zealand^ 1866. 

* The few and weak tribes of the South Island (numbering only 
about 1.500) sold their claims to 40,000,000 acres for a few thousand 
pounds. The negotiations for purchase extended over many years, 
and part of the consideration was the establishment of hospitals, and 
other special benefits. These promises, however, were never fulfilled 



590 ENGLAND AND 

unique in the history of colonisation. During 70 
years (1769-1840) EngHsh contacts multiplied; first 
commercial (whalers and sealers), then religious (,the 
earliest mission was founded in 1814), finally an 
irregular planting of settlers, chiefly of an inferior 
class. These various contacts had their principal seat 
about the Bay of Islands (see Map), and the con- 
sequent anarchy led to the establishment there of a 
British resident (1832). The epoch was character- 
ised by two conflicting tendencies, the "missionary 
policy" opposed to all colonisation,* and the recent 
policy of "systematic colonisation." The first was 
predominant in the Colonial Office, the second (fa- 
voured in the House of Commons) inspired the 
colonising expedition of the New Zealand Company 
(1839-40), which at once obliged the Government 
to assert the Crown's su23remacy.f 

Second Period : Imperial rule (1840-53). 

The imperial instructions were marked by a right 
spirit, and plauily contemplated the foundation of a 
colony for the equal benefit of Europeans and Natives. 
The treaty ofWaitangi (1840, see before, p. 526), 
signed by the majority of the chiefs, provided for both 
territory and sovereignty; surrendering the 'right of 
preemption' and political authority to the Queen, 
who, in return, guaranteed to the Maoris their lands 
and possessions, together with " her Majesty's royal 
protection, and all the privileges of British subjects." 



by the G-overnment [Westminster Mevieio, vol. xxv. p. 431). No wonder, 
therefore, that these southern natives were described, in 1858, as being 
" very poor." Pari. Papers, 1860, vol. xlvii. No. 492, p. 33. 

* See before, p. 550, and Pari. Papers, 1837-8, vol. xxi. p. 243. 

t Pari. Papers, 1844, vol. xiii., Report Select Com. New Zealand. 



THE UNCIVILISED COMMUNITIES. 591 

A Government, buying cheap and selling clear, but 
conferring no direct benefit on the natives, naturally- 
aroused discontent. Yet the real cause of disaster 
was not the ' preemptive right' alone ;* but its exercise 
coupled with our neglect of the duties of sovereignty. 
The observance of these would have effectually warded 
off land-leagues and Maori-king movements. f 

Auckland, in the remote north, was chosen by the 
imperial governor for the capital and seat of govern- 
ment; while the extensive settlements (1839-40) of 
the New Zealand Company were situated some 400 
miles off in the southernly regions (see Map). An 
imperial commissioner was sent to investigate all land- 
claims ; and the delay, with other mcidents attendant 
on the inquiry, irritated the settlers, and in various 
ways aroused distrust among the natives. Hence 
sprang disorders, to meet which the Company impro- 
vised a sort of government; a proceeding speedily 
resented by the governor, who thus inaugurated a 
policy, afterwards pursued with unhappy success to- 
wards the natives, and which consisted in three essen- 
tial points — to undertake to govern, not to govern, 
and lastly to punish for not obeying. 

The difficulty of governing such numerous and 
scattered tribes was indeed very great ; but no sys- 
tematic effort was made to provide for law and order, 
even as regarded the native population intermingled 
with or adjoining tlie British settlements. J After 
the first troubled years (1840-5), an era of outward 
quiet and colonial prosperity ensued, under the ad- 
ministration of Sir George Grey (1845-53). But 

^' Westminster JRevieio, 1864, vol. xxv. p. 430. 
•f Gorst, Maori King, p. 39. 

+ For a striking instance of this neglect and its results, see Gorst, 
Maori King, p. 389. 



592 ENGLAND AND 

his kindly intercourse was never completed by any 
efficient system. We find, indeed, Maoris employed 
on public works, hospitals provided, and schools en- 
couraged. Yet even these were imperfect; tribal 
property and filthy dwellings continued; while poli- 
tical agencies, a resident magistracy,'^ and police 
hardly existed in native districts. The governor's 
'sugar and flour' policy, based on presents to the 
chiefs, was despised and resented by the mass, and 
distrusted by the more enlightened few of the colo- 
nists. 

Tliird Period : Imperial- Colonial rule (1853-66). 

Their general habits, want of individual property, 
and ignorance of the English language, f ill prepared 
the natives for the coming change in the form of go- 
vernment. The constitution, carried out in 1853, in- 
troduced a new element — the colonial Assembly, soon 
after (1856) completed by a "responsible ministry." 
I would here point attention to a broad distinction, 
seldom sufficiently appreciated, between our general 
and our special native policy; the first concerning 
remedial and preventive measures, the second the 
justice and expediency of a military intervention. 
The special policy directly embraces the second half 
of the period under consideration, that of the two 
successive wars (1860-1 and 1863-6, see Map). The 
general policy relates to its first half (1853-60), dur- 
ing which the seeds of previous neglect ripened, and 
the symptoms of future revolt became manifest. Its 

* The Resident Magistrates Act, 1849, was very defective, and but 
few appointments were made, then or since, in native districts (see 
Map). 

t The missionaries, consistently enough, never taught it. Quarterly 
Review^ June 1854, p. 20. 



THE UNCIVILISED COMMUNITIES. 593 

leading feature is a humiliating and disastrous strug- 
gle between the Imperial and Colonial governments 
for the management of the natives, caused partly by 
injudicious or inadequate arrangements under the 
imperial constitution, partly by the uncompromising 
ambition and ill-judged economy of the Colonial As- 
sembly and Ministry. 

The Constitution had to provide for two objects, 
and to adjust two elements. The chief object was 
to govern ; yet, as regarded the Maoris, the Imperial 
Act (15 & 16 Vict. c. 72) merely reserved a power 
to set aside native districts, without making o*!c stipu- 
lating for an adequate financial provision. The an- 
nual subsidy (which never exceeded 42,000^.) was 
withdrawn, and 7,500/. alone was reserved for native 
purposes, of which 5,000/. was devoted to schools. 
The second object, land-huying^ was retained as an 
imperial function, and charged on the above fund; 
while the Governor received no powers for indivi- 
duahsing tribal land, even to the extent of complet- 
ing previous contracts (see before, p. 528). Of the 
two elements, the Assembly represented general^ the 
Provincial Councils local interests; both necessary, 
yet each in its way a source of danger. Two pro- 
^dnces had been added (Otago, 1840; Canterbury, 
1850) to the four original ones (1840); and centrali- 
sation for common action, though difficult, was very 
desirable, indeed indispensable. The relative propor- 
tions between the Native and European populations, 
their respective distribution and history,* pointed, 
however, to two or three distinct groups — Aucldand; 
Taranaki and Wellington ; and the three southernmost 
pro\dnces — as requiring special arrangements. But 

'^ See Map ; and Thomson's New Zealand^ Appendix, table ix. 

QQ 



594 ENGLAND AND 

this fact was overlooked, and in consequence those 
best acquainted with the Maoris, and most exposed 
to danger and loss from war, were liable to see their 
opinions overruled by a parliamentary majority in the 
General Assembly.* On the other hand, provincial 
councils, with elective superintendents, were anxious 
to acquire land, and, though lavish as to what directly 
concerned European,f parsimonious as regarded na- 
tive interests. The Constitution encouraged these 
tendencies by blending the two chief sources of re- 
venue, the land-sales and customs ; a disposition ag- 
gravated by the Assembly, who forthwith handed 
over the entire management and proceeds of the 
Crown -lands (expressly intrusted to them by the 
Imperial Act), together with three-eighths of the 
customs, to the provincial councils. 

The Assembly pursued a course which plainly 
showed their ignorance or disregard of the extreme 
danger of leaving the native policy in statu quo. 
When, in 1856, a " responsible Ministry" was finally 
created, the Governor reserved the management of the 
natives as an imperial question. The Colonial Minis- 
try reluctantly assented to this; but they and the 
Assembly, on the plea that the understanding did not 
bind them to give the Governor extraordinary powers, 
persistently refused to make such arrangements,! 

* This actually occurred in reference to the first or Taranaki war. 

t See Hursthouse's New Zealand^ pp. 166-76. 

X A connected series of bills was introduced (1856-8) by the Colo- 
nial Ministry, to organise a government in native districts and gra- 
dually to individualise tribal land. The scheme as a whole was admir- 
able; but it placed the administration under the shifting "responsible 
Ministry." The Governor and Home Government refused their con- 
sent to the principal bill (The Native Territorial Rights Bill), unless 
some stable and independent body were formed, fairly representing all 
interests. The Ministry, however, could perceive in this nothing but 



THE UNCIVILISED COMMUNITIES. 595 

legislative or financial,* as might have rendered a 
joint government, always difficult, at least possible. 
It is, however, just to say that the Colonial Ministry 
made an ejSPort (1857-8) to create an efficient ma- 
gistracy for native districts, which seems to have 
failed chiefly through the influence of the Imperial 
Land-purchase, then united with the Native depart- 
ment, f 

This struggle for power lasted until 1863, when 
the British Government refused, shortly before the 
second war began, to continue the joint management 
of the Maoris, which thenceforth devolved upon the 
colony; the imperial authorities simply reserving the 
control of military arrangements, with the power of 
refusing to sanction or cooperate in wliat it might not 
approve. Facts, I think, contradict the assertion of 
the British minister, that "the system of imperial 
trusteeship was, before 1856, real and efl'ective;"J 
and the convenient hypothesis which attributes all 
the disasters to " representative government. "§ But 
a grave responsibility must rest with the Assembly 
and Ministry who would make no adequate provision 
for governing the natives, and who, though not legally 

" a narrow jealousy of Colonial interference" (Parliamentary Papers, 
1860, vol. xlvii. No. 492, p. 30), and accordingly the scheme fell to the 
ground. 

* The Colonial Assembly and Ministry were willing to grant 
16,000Z. per annum for native purposes (including the 7500^. reserved 
on the Civil list), provided the entire management were conceded to 
them; but on no other terms. Somewhat later, after the first war 
(1860-1), the Assembly voted 26,000Z. a-year for the like purposes. In 
the year 1861, 100,000/. was spent on European official salaries in the 
North Island alone ; 777/. on native magistrates in hoth islands. Par- 
liamentary Papers, 1862, vol. xxxvii. Nos. 3040 and 3049, p. 32. 

t Gorst's Maori King, pp. 109-28. 

:|: Parliamentary Papers, 1863, vol. xxxviii. No. 177, p. 141. 

§ Ibid. 1861, vol. xiii. ev. 2636. 



596 ENGLAND AND 

responsible, actively supported and urged a warlike 
policy.* 

This special policy raises two distinct questions : 
first, was the military intervention, having regard to 
the antecedents, justifiable or wise? secondly, did the 
particular circumstances warrant it? Attention is in 
general too exclusively fixed on the second question, 
which involves, as to one war (Taranaki, 1860-1), the 
intricacies of a tribal history and title ; as to the other 
(Waikato, 1863-6) certain native atrocities, deplorable 
though not unprovoked. The original cause of war 
— the forcible seizure of the "Waitara block" (see 
Map), now proved to have been illegalf — was, and 
indeed still is, defended as the legitimate and neces- 
sary assertion of the Queen's sovereignty against law- 
less combination. We may justly hesitate to accept 
this solution, when it appears that a provincial coun- 
cil (New Plymouth) petitioned to have the tribal 
tenure disregarded,! and that the unusual price of 
205. per acre was paid for this land,§ which, though 
small (about 700 acres), comprised the only good 
harbour near the settlement. Yet even were it other- 
wise, and making every allowance for the peculiar po- 
sition of a settlement hampered by want of space to 
expand, it must be regretted that the earliest asser- 

^' It has been said that there would have been no wars in New Zea- 
land, had the Colonists been made responsible for the consequences. 
The double government was no doubt a great evil ; but I doubt this 
position, having regard to the high tone taken by the Colonial Ministry 
as to the moral obligations of the mother country, and the disposition 
shown then and since to lay all the blame of neglect and mistake on 
the Imperial authorities. 

t Westminster Revieiu, 1864, vol. xxv. pp. 464-5 ; and Parliamentary 
Papers, 1864, March. 

:|; Westminster Revieio^ 1864, vol. xxv. p. 457. 

§ Parliamentary Papers, 1860, vol. xlvii. No. 552, p. 50. 



THE UNCIVILISED COMMUNITIES. 597 

tion of " British law in a British settlement"* should 
have been in the interest of British land-buying. 

But the first of the above questions is that really 
at issue. The answer must, I believe, be in the ne- 
gative, whether we examine the local antecedents of 
each war, or the antecedents common to both the 
Taranaki ' land - league' and the Waikato 'king- 
movement.' The general success of land -buying 
(see Map) should be contrasted with the just and 
growing discontent of the Maoris towards a govern- 
ment which conferred on them no " privileges of 
British subjects," unless it were that of being treated, 
when occasion served, as British ' rebels.' The just 
and wise policy would have been to wait ; introducing 
law and order among the more friendly tribes, and 
leaving this gradually to work a change for the better 
among the ill-disposed. 

On this ground alone, therefore, I regard the 
measures (New Zealand Settlements Act and Native 
Eebellion Suppression Act, 1863) passed by the As- 
sembly shortly after the breakmg out of the second 
or Waikato war, and which provided an indiscrimi- 
nate and arbitrary scheme of confiscation (see Map) 
and punishment, as being defensible neither in justice 
nor policy. Severe precautions and even stringent 
measures had, indeed, become necessary ;f but an 
equitable and forbearing spirit was equally so. The 
entire scheme, as proposed and in part carried into 
efi'ect, seems highly objectionable and illusory. The 

'' Hursthouse's Neio Zealand^ p. 500. 

f On this ground, I think that the suggestion of the Home Govern- 
ment to substitute cession for confiscation was unwise ; but the Colo- 
nists, in complaining that this step and the inaction of the British 
troops prolonged the war, forget their source in the ' Confiscation 
scheme.' 



598 ENGLAND AND 

plan devised for British Kafraria (see before, p. 587) 
was reversed. Confiscation was adopted not as a 
military precaution; but to punish, the natives, to in- 
demnify the settlers, and to promote colonisation by 
planting 20,000 settlers in a territory " the most fer- 
tile and attractive in the island."* The sales of con- 
fiscated land have proved financially a failure ;f and 
the partial importation of settlers has driven the dis- 
contented section of the natives into the mountains. J 
Yet the Colonists have given indications of a 
more humane and wiser policy, in ways before al- 
luded to, and confirmed by more recent acts.§ Hav- 
ing at last obtained complete self-government, and 
evincing a determination to dispense with military 
aid, as far as possible, it may be hoped that they 
will evince real statesmanship, redeem their repeated 
pledges, and treat the Maoris as fellow-men and " Bri- 
tish subjects." The Imperial Government have, I 
think, a twofold duty. Avoiding all needless irri- 
tation, and making a liberal provision for pecuniary 
obligations justly incurred by past mismanagement, 
the Home Ofiice should refuse their cooperation 
with questionable projects ;|| and, while conceding 

* Parliamentary Papers, 1862, vol. xxxvii. No. 2798, p. 42. 

t Ibid. 1866, February, p. 191. 

:|: Their dangerous attitude appears plainly from Mr. Fox's recent 
book, and especially the passage (p. 246) in which he dares the Home 
Government to remove the 6,000 troops still left. The wide-spread 
'Pai-Marire' fanaticism, begun in 1863 and closely connected with 
political disaffection, is a further and serious difificulty. 

§ Particularly the Act of 1862, for facilitating the individualisa- 
tion of tribal titles through a Tribunal, and recent declarations of the 
Ministry and Assembly. 

II The New-Zealand Settlements Act, 1863 (amended in 1864, and 
limited in its duration to December 1865), has never been allowed by 
the Crown, and it would seem that its allowance will depend on that 
of the subsequent Act, 1865, continuing it. Pari. Papers, 1865 and 1866. 



THE UNCIVILISED com:munities. 599 

the ample freedom necessary for responsibility, se- 
cure such fundamental arrangements* as may best 
consist with obligations deliberately incurred, and 
conduce to the advantage of all the subjects — Euro- 
pean and Maori — of the British Crown in New Zea- 
land. 

YII. CoNCLUDiNa Remarks. 

The future of Savage and Semi- civilised commu- 
nities — the difficulties arising from past neglect and 
mismanagement, and our imperfect conceptions, being 
duly weighed — is not hopeless. On the contrary, the 
worst results to them of European contacts, whether 
purely commercial or colonial, are essentially due to 
social causes, which, once distinctly apprehended, fall 
within human control. Science, vindicating yet guid- 
ing philanthropy, mth mcreasing force establishes as 
a fundamental doctrine the " Unity of the race and 
the leadership of the West."f A few remarks will 
be offered, pointing out its special and practical in- 
terest as affecting the doctrines of uncivilised popu- 
lations. 

Modern scientific thought, while taking due ac- 
count of climate, geographical features, and race, 
increasingly subordinates them to those fundamental 

* These arrangements are of three sorts — 1. MUitary : it woiild 
seem necessary to have stations, as in British Kafraria. 2. Constitu- 
tional : the recent removal of the capital to Wellington, while useful 
for general, seems likely to enhance the diflBculties of local, govern- 
ment, unless some provision be made for grouping and provincial su- 
perintendence (see before, p. 593, and Times, 25th April 1866). 3. 
Financial : the present state of the general and provincial financial 
arrangements is most imperfect and embarrassing (see before, p. 594, 
and Pari. Papers, 1866, February, p. 186. See the note in Army Esti- 
mates, Pari. Papers, 1866, p. 106, as to the terms of Imperial aid. 

t See the first Essay in this volume. 



600 ENGLAND AND 

laws of social grouping and historical development 
which, though greatly modified by circumstances, 
are essentially general.* When viewed in this way 
the condition of existing savage tribes throws light 
on the remote origin of our o^vn advanced civilisa- 
tion. The philosophy of history thus inspires a con- 
viction that the feeble steps of primitive humanity 
may be hereafter no longer oppressed, but sustained 
and strengthened by the hand of civilised man. But 
the same philosophy points to Western Europe as the 
appropriate organ of this support and progressive im- 
pulse, as consisting of those nations on whom a long 
inheritance of civilisation has devolved the duty and 
noble task of wielding its great powers for the ad- 
vantage of weak and backward populations. 

This duty, however, presents extraordinary diffi- 
culties, indicated m the present Essay, and which I 
will briefly recapitulate, beheving that clearer know- 
ledge must facilitate ultimate victory. 

I would premise that the general conception just 
stated as linking the extremes of barbarous and civi- 
lised society, requires, in reference to the present 
subject, a twofold modification, equally necessary 
for scientific precision and practical usefulness. " Fo- 
reign relations," at first sight, would seem to exclude 
all but border tribes or independent islands. Yet 
the term is only too applicable to communities which, 
whether it be from the surviving efi:ects of slavery 
(the Hottentots and West Indian Negroes), or from 
the results of neglect and error (the Kafirs and Ma- 
oris), are not really mcorporated mth, and therefore, 
in effect, remain outside of Western ci^dlisation. 

* See Quatref ages, " L'Unite de la Eace humaine," Revue des Deux 
Mondes, 1860 and 1861, and M'Lennan's Primitive Marriage^ Preface. 



THE UNCIVILISED COMMUNITIES. 601 

Again, while merely commercial relations remain 
under the direct control of the European nations, 
their respective Colonial offshoots tend, more and 
more, to become semi-independent and intermediate 
powers, themselves almost creating a new interna- 
tional system, and profoundly modifying the relations 
of the parent country with the native populations. 

The oTeatest difficultv of all is, I believe, that of 
sufficiently entering into the mind of the savage and 
understanding barbarous society as a whole. The 
most thoughtful of recent writers* largely attribute 
our small progress towards acquiring a beneficial in- 
fluence over savages to the prevailing ignorance of 
their ideas and ways, and our inability to compre- 
hend modes of thought diverging so Avidely from 
those which social affinities, a characteristic history, 
and long habit have rendered a second nature to the 
inhabitants of Western Europe. The want of such 
insight is, I believe, mainly owing to the narrowness 
and inflexibility of our conceptions concerning So- 
ciety and Man. Hence the establishment of just and 
beneficent relations between civilised and barbarous 
man presupposes a wide intellectual reconstruction. 
The progress making towards this, though consider- 
able, leaves much to be desired. Apart from mental 
difficulties, its realisation is impeded by the grave 
imperfections of political existence, and the still 
more serious deficiencies of moral sentiment neces- 
sarily incident to a period of prolonged transition 
and even of intellectual and social anarchy. It 
must, therefore, be long before Western Europe, 
regenerated in heart, head, and life, can assume her 
final leadership in relation to uncivilised communities. 

'^' See Merivale, Colonisation and the Colonies. 



602 ENGLAND AND 

The truth just stated possesses great practical im- 
portance as a corrective of immature conceptions and 
exaggerated expectations. Yet its full recognition 
need not stay the effort to realise a more enlight- 
ened Policy. So long as religious and philanthropic 
missions are undirected by larger conceptions of so- 
ciety and man, so loiig as industry remains at the 
level of individual gain-seeking, untempered by so- 
cial views and generous aspirations ; so long also 
must our statesmanship be content to wait and aim 
at results, comparatively speaking, small. Yet a 
wise transitional policy — one that should adapt itself 
to actual possibilities, holding fast by a few broad 
principles and preparing the way for a normal future 
— is not the less a real policy. Its adoption by the 
great republic of the Western nations is, even now, 
not chimerical;* and no member of this body is, in 
her mdividual sphere, more plainly called to plan 
and pursue such a policy than England. The re- 
lations with her Colonies — -once subject-provinces, 
henceforward more and more dependent allies — 
still leave her considerable powers, and impose a 
direct though joint responsibility towards their native 
populations. Avoiding all needless irritation, yet 
maintaining her own just dignity, f she may refuse 
cooperation with questionable schemes ; J employ her 
great authority to enforce compliance with wise and 
necessary arrangements ;§ and in every admissible 
way, directly and indirectly, vindicate the inalienable 

«^ See before, pp. 566-7. 

f See the 11th resolution of the Select Committee on Colonial 
Military Expenditure, Pari, Papers, 1861, vol. xiii. 

+ See before, pp. 597-8. 

§ See before, pp. 588 and 599, Westminster Review^ 1884, vol. xxv. 
p. 472, and the evidence annexed to the report just quoted. 



THE UNCIVILISED COJ^IMUNITIES. 603 

duty of protecting these, the weakest of her " Bri- 
tish subjects." But the progressive abridgment of 
her imperial sway, or even its future extinction, can- 
not diminish, and may augment, the obhgations and 
just influence of England, as an arbitress of public 
opinion, imposing, through agencies nobler and more 
powerful than those wielded by ancient Kome, the 
"ways of peace," and the blessings of peaceful civi- 
lisation upon the now Savage and Semi- civilised com- 
munities of the earth. 

HENRY DIX HUTTON. 



THE END. 



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